Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog

Joel Spolsky: What do you do if you find yourself reacting to a rival’s agenda instead of setting your own? Break the cycle as fast as you can. What do you do if you find yourself reacting to a rival’s agenda instead of setting your own? The answer is to break the cycle as fast as you can.

In the web browser space, this applies to working groups and editors, too.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/942/

Got this in the mail today… uh, OK.

Update: My RFC 4287 co-editor Mark Nottingham won’t link to this nonsense, but I’ll link to him.

From: IETF Secretariat
Subject: Posting of IPR Disclosure
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:32:10 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Mark Nottingham, Robert Sayre:

An IPR disclosure that pertains to your RFC entitled “The Atom Syndication
Format” (RFC4287) was submitted to the IETF Secretariat on 2008-03-31 and has
been posted on the “IETF Page of Intellectual Property Rights Disclosures”
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/ipr_list.cgi). The title of the IPR
disclosure is “Google Inc.’s Statement about IPR related to RFC 5023 and RFC
4287.”

The IETF Secretariat

Shawn Wilsher: “Most module owners and their peers are often patchers as well. If they have to now write tests for other people’s patches, do reviews in their module, and do patches elsewhere (because nobody who’s a peer or module owner really works in just one module), they are highly likely to put something on the back-burner. Personally, any bug that wasn’t a serious issue that required me to write a test would probably become very low priority (and I suspect that to be the same for most other people).”

That’s the idea.

Reading posts from Shawn and Edward, who have been doing a great job with testing, I see that we’re hitting a bit of inertia with testing requirements, review policies, approvals, etc. I think this is a real problem, and we need to find a way to reduce the number of hoops. I don’t think waiving testing requirements will be the way to go.

In Shawn’s post, he raises the issue of requiring tests from new contributors. This is a harder situation. I think it’s best not to require tests from new people, especially on their first patch, unless there is something easy for them to cut and paste. As they become more involved in the project, they’ll need to step up their game. But this presents a dilemma. Code that needs patching from external contributors is probably stuff that really needs tests. That means module owners and peers should be finding ways to cover testing of these patches. I don’t have an answer here, but we’ll have to find one.

All that said, regressions aren’t fun, so let’s keep our perspective balanced.

I was looking over the spreadsheet covering Mozilla’s Acid3 failures, and it struck me that very few of the fixes would substantially improve the Web or the browser. They are bugs and they will be fixed (except maybe SMIL… wtf?), but they don’t impact authors or users at all. Looks mostly like an opportunity for grandstanding about “commitment to standards.” I think testing createNodeIterator while text nodes don’t interoperate is both misguided and hypocritical.

Besides, commitment to standards is strong at Mozilla, where we don’t constantly seek to rubber stamp our own implementation.

P.S. — I hadn’t seen that Opera was first to score 100/100. Congratulations on that, poorly conceived standards and all.

P.P.S. — Shameful!

Overall Status

Blocking Firefox 3: 107 bugs found.
Blocking Gecko 1.9: 131 bugs found.

Blockers fixed between 12:00am and 11:59pm

Bug 416933. Invalid range error for in Þ-ß case-insensitive regular expression. Patch by Brian Crowder.

Bug 424093. CNN Video page will not load. Patch by Dave Camp.

Bug 407861. Bolding the found text in autocomplete breaks ligatures. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 407946. emphasize all matching text in title and url, not just the first match in title and url. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 424028. beta 5 theme update for windows (xp and vista). Patch by Alex Faaborg.

Bug 423874. Allocating native functions together with JSObject. Patch by Igor Bukanov.

Bug 423806. Keyhole (combined back forward) for small icons mode on windows. Patch by mcdavis941.

Bug 424163. topcrash [@ sqlite3BitvecSet]. Patch by Peter Weilbacher.

Bug 424165. topcrashes [@ FontEntry::Release] [@ gfxWindowsPlatform::FindFontForCharProc] [@ gfxWindowsPlatform::FindFontEntry]. Patch by Stuart Parmenter.

Bug 423977. Add-ons rating stars now a grid of 11×11 icons. Patch by Reed Loden [:reed].

Bug 421069. specifying line-height in px or with decimal values causes rendering errors. Patch by Robert O’Callahan (:roc) (reduced activity March 18 to April 9).

Bug 423130. Inconsistent layout with padding, removing RLM. Patch by Uri Bernstein (Google).

Bug 407204. adjust the title and url text sizes. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 415403. Show matches for all search words for location bar autocomplete. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 364713. [Cairo][regression] bold and italic not simulated for families that lack bold and/or italic faces. Patch by John Daggett (:jtd).

Bug 424035. Crash [@ JS_IsArrayObject] when trying to decode a bogus JSON string. Patch by Robert Sayre.

Bug 420786. Setting image as desktop background causes a crash in Linux. Patch by Sylvain Pasche.

Bug 414201. JPEG images dragged to the Finder have their file extensions changed to .jfif. Patch by Vladimir Vukicevic (:vlad).

Bug 404658. Drag and drop in Bookmarks Sidebar allows bookmarks to be placed in top level (”All Bookmarks”) folder. Patch by Dietrich Ayala.

Bug 418079. [Esc] doesn’t cancel changes in contextual bookmark dialog. Patch by Asaf Romano.

Overall Status

Blocking Firefox 3: 108 bugs found.
Blocking Gecko 1.9: 130 bugs found.

Blockers fixed between 12:00am and 11:59pm

Bug 423260. Can’t book movie tickets. Patch by Johnny Stenback (:jst).

Bug 418989. js_FillPropertyCache Asserts and dies. Patch by Brendan Eich.

Bug 423790. Phishing Backoff not working with 400s. Patch by Dave Camp.

Bug 420356. Ship blocklist.xml with Firefox. Patch by Dave Townsend (Mossop).

Bug 423736. Proto Theme landing regressed sunspider. Patch by Gavin Sharp.

Bug 420869. Script stack space in Firefox 3.0b4pre much smaller than it was in Firefox 2.0.0.12. Patch by Igor Bukanov.

Bug 422926. MSNBC Videos won’t play. Patch by Johnny Stenback (:jst).

Bug 423446. Crash [@ npdsplay.dll][@ UserCallWinProcCheckWow][@ @0x300bf8c3] with plugins on reload or back and forward. Patch by Johnny Stenback (:jst).

Bug 421584. Filter on DOM-animated element incorrectly masks drawing region.. Patch by Robert Longson.

Bug 423960. regression: disabling history remembers visits. Patch by Marco Bonardo [mak77].

Bug 382542. Font entries need to depend on the style (Arabic characters not displayed in italic). Patch by Stuart Parmenter.

Bug 420505. mozStorageService isn’t as threadsafe as it claims to be. Patch by Shawn Wilsher (sdwilsh).

Bug 423599. Misaligned navigation panel on computerworld.com due to tall combobox. Patch by Michael Ventnor.

Bug 417760. cannot focus() img elements with tabindex=”-1″. Patch by Aaron Leventhal.

Bug 423570. Combo boxes should not have read-only state. Patch by Aaron Leventhal.

Bug 423700. aria-activedescendant broken on . Patch by Aaron Leventhal.

Bug 421602. [FIX]Image onload fails to fire intermittently. Patch by Boris Zbarsky (reviews very slow until May).

Bug 417356. No margins in GTK Print/Print-Prev, until you manually select a paper size. Patch by Daniel Holbert [:dholbert].

Bug 423345. Crash [@ nsPrintEngine::SetupToPrintContent] when trying to print from print preview with a frameset page. Patch by Daniel Holbert [:dholbert].

Bug 423154. off-by-one error for browser.bookmarks.max_backups. Patch by Dietrich Ayala.

Bug 420425. Unintended frame targeting behavior change from file:// URI security changes.. Patch by Daniel Veditz.

Bug 412348. Titles are missing in smart Bookmarks and Addressbar for urls w/out www. Patch by Ondrej Brablc.

Bug 420354. History not shown in sidebar when sorted by date or by date and site. Patch by Ondrej Brablc.

Bug 420967. file picker dialog from file upload behaves strangely. Patch by Steven Michaud.

Bug 421922. Tree Tables in Thunderbird and Firefox broken since March 6. Patch by alexander surkov.

Bug 418294. [10.5] Text pop-up is not vertically centered (1px too low). Patch by Vladimir Vukicevic (:vlad).

Bug 419668. filepicker throws an exception in NSOpenPanel openPanel runModalForDirectory when uploading files. Patch by Steven Michaud.

Overall Status

Blocking Firefox 3: 99 bugs found.
Blocking Gecko 1.9: 125 bugs found.

Blockers fixed between 12:00am and 11:59pm

Bug 423137. Handle ratings change from bug 417442. Patch by Dave Townsend (Mossop).

Bug 422808. nsXMLHTTPRequest and nsXMLDocument forwarding requests for nsIAuthPrompt is troublesome. Patch by Gavin Sharp.

Bug 423361. [proto] Land Proto 0.14 changes. Patch by Kevin Gerich (Gone until March 28).

Bug 423470. fix calls to PlacesUtils._uri. Patch by Marco Bonardo [mak77].

Bug 422420. Revert home button move and related migration code. Patch by Mike Connor.

Bug 423377. Change max-persistent-connections-per-server to 6.. Patch by Robert Sayre.

Bug 407839. restrict globalStorage to same host. Patch by Dave Camp.

Bug 404658. Drag and drop in Bookmarks Sidebar allows bookmarks to be place in top level (”/”) folder above bookmarks menu. Patch by Dietrich Ayala.

Bug 419552. Blocklisting Java plugin still loads java. Patch by Dave Townsend (Mossop).

Bug 419582. Unblocklisted plugin should be set to enable on startup. Patch by Dave Townsend (Mossop).

Bug 393678. location bar autocomplete should take word boundaries in account. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 420482. Big discrepancy in ETA between Downloads Manager & Downloads status bar panel. Patch by Edward Lee (Mardak).

Bug 422135. not showing authentication dialog box when request is made throught XMLHttpRequest (nsIAuthPrompt implementation doesn’t handle realms produced by NS_GetAuthKey). Patch by Gavin Sharp.

Bug 419794. work out key API for nsICryptoHMAC. Patch by Honza Bambas (:mayhemer).

Bug 419839. Icon alignment issue on updated mac theme. Patch by Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath].

Bug 418776. Assertion failure: !OBJ_GET_PARENT(cx, obj), at mozilla/js/src/jsobj.c:2648. Patch by Johnny Stenback (:jst).

Bug 422205. Assertion: XOWs should have stopped us from getting here!!!. Patch by Johnny Stenback (:jst).

Bug 423436. Elements embedding SVG by ref. don’t resize if they depend on intrinsic percentage width/height. Patch by Jonathan Watt.

Bug 419070. All crash reports return uptime as ‘0′. Patch by K Lars Lohn.

Bug 419170. The history includes too few days, browser.history_expire_days_min is ignored. Patch by Marco Bonardo [mak77].

Bug 329741. history.dat, formhistory.dat, downloads.rdf should be deleted when the user clears private data. Patch by Mike Connor.

Bug 414338. nsFind crashes if passed a range rooted at a document. Patch by Smaug.

Bug 380015. Crash [@ nsFrame::BoxReflow] on startup when Fx 2.0 libraries not removed from install directory. Patch by Robert Strong [:rs] (do not email).

Bug 392233. Text kerning broken by scaling/viewBox (space between letters or letters above each other). Patch by Robert O’Callahan (:roc) (reduced activity March 18 to April 9).

Bug 415428. Crash reporter dialog not wide enough for l10n. Patch by Ted Mielczarek (:luser).

Bug 422105. Navbar disappears upon holding down F11. Patch by Michael Ventnor.

Bug 422661. Long table border is rendered incompletely. Patch by Vladimir Vukicevic (:vlad).

Bug 423524. Consistently get CGContextGetType: invalid context Errors in Terminal. Patch by Vladimir Vukicevic (:vlad).

Overall Status

Blocking Firefox 3: 109 bugs found.
Blocking Gecko 1.9: 143 bugs found.

Blockers fixed between 12:00am and 11:59pm

Bug 420756. landing default mailto: handler fails to reset the alwaysAsk stuff. Patch by Justin Dolske.

Bug 406755. EV certs not recognized as EV with some cross-certification scenarios. Patch by Kai Engert (:kaie).

Bug 423475. Paypal crashes loading main site. Patch by Kai Engert (:kaie).

Bug 423071. SVG bad clippath rendering when changed via DOM in FF3 b4 but works in FF2. Patch by Robert Longson.

Bug 423124. CMD/CTRL+clicking a bookmark creates two new tabs. Patch by Marco Bonardo [mak77].

Bug 422420. Revert home button move and related migration code. Patch by Mike Connor.

Bug 413589. enable SQLite full-text (fulltext) index module (fts3) so extensions can use it. Patch by Myk Melez [:myk].

Bug 393498. on cut, then undo of a bookmark, we lose the dateAdded and lastModified values. Patch by Dietrich Ayala.

Bug 413630. web-based handler en-US default options. Patch by Justin Dolske.

Bug 423218. Restart option does not appear for installs from the local filesystem. Patch by Dave Townsend (Mossop).

Bug 418845. Enabling a11y massively degrades performance of dynamic addition on Linux. Patch by Ginn Chen.

Bug 422326. Visual glitch in site icon display part of location bar. Patch by Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath].

Bug 423247. Certificate error for iframe is shown as a dialog instead of an error page, making it impossible to add an exception. Patch by Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath].

Bug 395110. server provided content-type takes precedent over type-attribute. Patch by Johnny Stenback (:jst).

Bug 384897. in-product links to AMO should be https:// (and not http://). Patch by Axel Hecht [:Pike].

Bug 419746. SVG crash in gfxASurface::SetDeviceOffset() via nsSVGMaskFrame::ComputeMaskAlpha(). Patch by Robert Longson.

Bug 422079. Plugin names need to be converted to Unicode. Patch by Masayuki Nakano (Mozilla Japan).

Bug 363240. incorrect MathML width and position (nsMathMLContainerFrames have zero preferred width). Patch by Karl Tomlinson (:karlt).

Bug 413631. Crash when walking through tree items in Xulrunner application. Patch by Nobody; OK to take it and work on it.

Bug 422394. Tab characters in fixed width text shouldn’t expand to nothing. Patch by Robert O’Callahan (:roc).

Bug 409615. [10.4] Crash with flash file uploader [@ HIToolbox@0xf4c9b][@ ns4xPluginInstance::HandleEvent(nsPluginEvent*, int*)]. Patch by Steven Michaud.

Step 1: Visit YouTube and view Depeche Mode’s Enjoy The Silence. (Feel free to pick a band you like instead)

Step 2: Visit yahoo.com or whatever. Maybe consume some blogs. Visit twitter.

Step 3: Type “Depeche” into the location bar.

Wow, that sucks less!