A 3-generation bug | Hacker News Reader

A 3-generation bug

bugzilla.mozilla.org

115 pointsmooreds16 comments

It's nothing new for Mozilla. This bug [1] about plugins capturing keys has been alive for more than 15 years now, even after getting 'major' importance level and 441 votes to fix it - which clearly shows they give little importance to these votes. Since it's one of the most annoying Firefox bugs ever and priorities are seemingly not assigned based on the advertised 'me too' votes, people resorted to writing their frustration in comments. What they did in return? They disabled comments on that thread as well, and then sat on the bug. There bureaucratic process turns off many contributors, and sometimes shows off the limitations of FOSS. Every other browser fixed that problem at one point of time, but Firefox still hasn't. New bugs for this issue are marked as duplicate of this and closed, and as a result, just get sunk into this black hole called issue 78414.

P.S. - What's the funniest thing? The bug is still marked as 'NEW'.

[1] : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414

This bug about plugins capturing keys has been alive for more than 15 years now

Please, let's have some consideration for the hard working folks there. They're barely scraping by. They only have a paltry $300 million or so per year to spend, and that just doesn't go very far these days.

http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...

http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/mozilla-takes-300m-gamb...

I'm omitting the /s tag at end. It's really a crying shame that nobody at Mozilla cares all that much, despite literally spending several billion dollars developing Firefox.

I think the best thing users could probably do is some sort of social media campaign to boycott firefox until this is fixed, or for someone to fork firefox with this fixed and to get users to swap over to that for a while.

By now anybody who'd otherwise be interested in fixing this one has seen the writing on the wall for NPAPI.

On the bright side, it will therefore be fixed pretty soon.

And, you won't believe it ! With an almost magic like event, this 1.5 decade old bug was marked fixed today, after I wrote this comment!

That was a great read. It's amazing how years pass and the only update to the issue is a large stream of other bugs being related to this one. On a side note, something as small as this triggers the deep down OCD in me and makes me feel uncomfortable for a little bit. How hard is this bug to fix!? Why am I not contributing!?!?

My biggest constant annoyance with FF is how it removes the back button in the (right-click) context meny if anything is selected.

There is a bug about it but nobody cared since this was supposed to be a feature..!

(Possibly one of the main reasons why I don't blindly accept as fact some of the things ux designers say.)

Edit: huge FF fan, I find that for me all the other browsers are still worse for any serious work/research. I guess it is mostly because the superior tab handling.

Chrome does the same. It's a bona fide standard!

> Recently I noticed that for every PDF I upload to Google Drive (on my Linux machine using firefox), later I cannot view it (on any of my devices)

That does seem like a bug in Google Drive too? Taking the MIME type too literally rather than do something more clever like verify the binary.

I guess as a company Mozilla needs overhaul who cares about users

My personal 3-generation bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143038 which is about <Shift> + Mouse wheel for horizontal scrolling. Open since 2002.

Shaming might work. A video, "10 Open Source Bugs Open for Over a Decade", might help.

If one has enough time on their hands to make such a video, surely contributions to fix the bugs would help much more?

Not everyone is a programmer, but might still want to contribute.

My wife is more of a troll than I am... I saw the comment and was pretty floored, she said:

Maybe he should tell his daughter not to use Firefox.

It's a bug heirloom.

Oh lord.

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