How a 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug
How a 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug
Tiny text boxes, lingering on screens like ghosts, exorcised after 2 decades.
This is what open source is all about: See a problem with your tool, fix it yourself, and everyone enjoys the improvements.
While the fix has created some regression, that bug is seeing work, too.
And this is why devs don't often focus on the minor issues. Haha. Good stuff.
To be clear, I love this story and kudos to Yifan Zhu for the initiative. Let's normalize crediting people properly
I see that this is one of the negative of OSS instead. Seems a lot of people aware of this bug, but there's no pressure to fix this until 22 years.
Or: It’s such a minor bug that nobody really cared enough and they devoted time to other, more important things. But they made the choice as a collective and not a bunch of suits in a board room.
This take makes no sense.
The bug was deliberately put there after he was born so he could fulfill the prophecy.
From here out when a tooltip disappears, I will say it Zhu'd away.
He's been working on it since he was 1 👶
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips.
"I just searched for 'tooltip' in the entire code base, examined stuff for possible candidates, and inserted debugging print statements to follow the execution," Zhu wrote.
The timer would be canceled on a mouse-out event, which Firefox wasn't getting when I used keyboard shortcuts to switch windows or virtual desktops."
Zhu pushed a commit that made tooltip display based on Firefox losing focus, rather than the mouse leaving the application.
Cobos Álvarez, who shepherded Zhu's fix into a commit, wrote to us that "this area is rather tricky," given various Firefox configurations and how they respond to different operating systems.
On social media, especially the Mastodon instances where you might expect to find people with opinions on Mozilla's XML User Interface Language, there was much rejoicing.
The original article contains 864 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Makes sense, motivation is very powerful. It helps to also not be jaded from years of working in the area.
Prophecy fulfilled i guess. Young man must be proud of his work.
That's a very interesting fix on a rare bug.
Can we get this guy to figure out why the fuck the URL rollover in the bottom left will not go away unless you shrink the video, roll onto a different link, then full screen the video again?
I've tried every change to userchrome.css that I can find and none of them fix it
Do you know if this is actually been reported as a bug? I've seen it myself, but just got annoyed and didn't report it or anything.
This bug has annoyed me plenty! Cheers to this kid!
Now this is podracing!