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Comment by lovskogen | Hacker News Reader

I thought about and had to work with Mozilla today. "Seven years have passed without this bug being fixed." https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259

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I guess we should just give up on everything Mozilla does, then.

Doing other things (that very few people are interested in or want) does not excuse having a broken browser stay unfixed for years. Firefox is well on its way to being the next IE6.

It's not always about what people are interested or want. Sometimes people give up on their long term interests for short term gain. Mozilla is about the long run.

And if it weren't for Firefox, you'd still be developing for IE6.

I'm sure that they care about those bugs, but right now the major battle for everyone is in the mobile platform area. If Firefox OS doesn't gain a foothold we're basically in walled garden area forever (even though Android is OSS I don't trust Google to not become reactionary once the market is saturated and Android dominates it; and through patents + branding Google can still prevent major forks if it wants to).

So for your own long term sake, you'd better wish that they do make it, even if they have to postpone a few CSS bug fixes.

Mozilla is about the nothing. They are not about the long run, they are conceding control of the browser market to google. Firefox OS is never going to be relevant, will have no impact on phones, and doesn't help anyways. Phones are just computers, we would already have linux, netbsd and openbsd available for them if the hardware were documented. Making a bad OS out of a browser is not solving the problem, because the problem is closed hardware, not closed software. And no, firefox developers do not care about those bugs, they have been open for 7+ years.

You can always submit a patch, remember that the source is Open, and everyone is welcome to contribute.

My cringe with Firefox are misfeatures like window.onbeforeunload. They deliberately break the expected behavior due to an unreasonable decision, but no browser is perfect.

That patch would not be welcome. The patch to make the behavior intuitive is literally to remove "!important" from one CSS file. They're not changing because they're afraid to break the web.

> They're afraid to break the web.

They tried a fix and it broke YouTube. So it seems like a reasonable fear. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259#c54

> The patch ... is literally to remove "!important" from one CSS file

It isn't a simple one line fix, as Firefox developer kindly explained. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259#c76

>That patch would not be welcome.

They describe what work would be required (and where the changes would likely be) for the patch to be accepted in the bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259#c80

It's a one-line fix to make it intuitive, but that's not what's needed here. Ultimately there should be some spec so that browser vendors can converge towards a single behavior.

Can you elucidate? From my naive understanding of the back button API, I always thought Firefox's default behavior (not firing onpopstate on page load) made way more sense than say Chrome's. I guess both vendors make silly decisions sometimes.

>remember that the source is Open, and everyone is welcome to contribute.

Problem is, not everybody knows C++. Having a bug open for 7 years makes me think the issue will never be resolved. All I can do is wait or use another browser. One annoyance I have with Firefox is the lack of built in keychain support. This really summarizes how I feel: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400#c94

That fix wouldn't require C++ knowledge at all. It involves changing some CSS. The issue is the effect it would have on sites that expect it to be styled the way that it is.

The one I linked to ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400 ) would, it was a different example.

As for the original bug, this post: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259#c82 seems to suggest every browser but Firefox supports changing line-height. Wouldn't Firefox be going against the expected behavior?

I don't know enough code to do that.

If you need that much styling control over a text area, using a content editable region and Javascript for the interaction is almost certainly a better option.

An even better option is to use emscripten to bundle custom HTML rendering engine that would draw styled text input using Wayland server running on <canvas>

You kid, but despite how horrifying that is, something like it will probably end up happening.

Why not just CSS? All I want is to set the line-height.

15 years and counting! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540

"Last year I asked for requirements that would lead to the successful closure of this bug. [...] I haven't heard back."

If no one can even provide that...

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