Quick Firefox bug



  • So I use Firefox as a secondary browser so I don't get my RobotsInTheNews login cookies mixed up with my other Google account's login cookies.

    At some point in the last few weeks Google broken YouTube beyond belief, and I got into this weird state where it was letting me upload a video but simultaneously I wasn't logged in(?). Anyway, I decided to wipe Firefox and start over fresh to fix whatever error state Google introduced. Quick repro:

    History -> Clear Recent History -> Time Range: Everything

    Close Firefox.

    Re-open Firefox

    History -> Reopen Previous Session

    OH HEY LOOK all my pages are back. What part of "delete EVERYTHING" did you not understand, Firefox?



  • Bigger Firefox/YouTube bug:

    Either Firefox, YouTube, or both completely broke how authentication is handled when uploading YouTube videos. The problem I was clearing FF cookies to fix apparently is some incompatibility that just started a few days ago when one of them changed their shit.

    Time to use IE.

    EDIT: YouTube finally added drag-and-drop upload support for IE. Time to delete Firefox and pretend it doesn't exist.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    What part of "delete EVERYTHING" did you not understand, Firefox?
     

    The "Everything" part, apparently.

    I'm willing to bet real fake money that Firefox's version of "Reopen Previous Session" includes restoring the entire browser state, and it had last saved your browser state before clearing history. Which means clearing the history doesn't actually delete the history.

    I can see it being a feature, if you were on CSI and needed to hack someone's hardbox.

    https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-previous-session#w_settings-may-be-incorrect

     



  • I think it's more ignoring the intent of the user in favor of the implementation of the feature.

    The timeline goes like this: "delete all data" -> "close browser (save session data on close)"

    When my INTENT was obviously to delete ALL data everywhere ever, and it should have done:

    "delete all data" -> "close browser (realize the user closed browser immediately after deleting all data, don't save session data because he obviously wants a fresh state)"

    Really what it should have is IE's "reset EVERYTHING" button which not only clears all data, but also resets all preferences, security settings, and add-ins. But I couldn't find that. In any case, since Firefox + YouTube are completely broken right now, and YouTube is literally the only thing I ever used Firefox for, bubye Firefox.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So I use Firefox as a secondary browser so I don't get my RobotsInTheNews login cookies mixed up with my other Google account's login cookies.

    If you use a secondary browser for Youtube and really want to hate it, try Opera. On Windows 8 neither IE or Chrome require Flash, but Opera does, and whenever a new Youtube window is open there is a message saying "click to activate and use this control". The video will play (most of the time) but the toolbar is not working until the video is first clicked. Quite annoying.


    Plus it keeps asking to dowload the latest version of the browser on startup, which is even worse than starting Firefox and having to wait for an automatic update.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Mozilla Developer's Mission Statement said:

    "Ignore the intent of the user in favor of the implementation of the feature."
     

    =(

    Hey, everyone. Here's a pop quiz. Let's say you're on a page and there's a bunch of animated gifs, probably in people's avatars and signatures. They're fun and all, but they're getting a bit annoying. You press ESC. What should happen?

    If you answered "It should instantly stop loading the page and halt all animated gifs just like it's done in every browser ever made since ever", then here's a hearty WONTFIX go fuck yourselves from the self-same developers.



  • The EVERYTHING in "delete EVERYTHING" is the timeframe(How ond things shold be keept).

    There should be checkboxes in the requester which allows you to control exactly what to delete. (A really cool feature).

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @Mozilla Developer's Mission Statement said:

    "Ignore the intent of the user in favor of the implementation of the feature."
     

    =(

    Hey, everyone. Here's a pop quiz. Let's say you're on a page and there's a bunch of animated gifs, probably in people's avatars and signatures. They're fun and all, but they're getting a bit annoying. You press ESC. What should happen?

    If you answered "It should instantly stop loading the page and halt all animated gifs just like it's done in every browser ever made since ever", then here's a hearty WONTFIX go fuck yourselves from the self-same developers.

    I would never have expected ESC to stop animated GIFs. IMHO this feedback from the thread sums it all:


    @Comment 9 said:

    We can't have Escape acting differently, because it violates the Law of Least Astonishment.



    If I was a Firefox developer and there was a long and painful discussion about such an irrelevant feature, I would have called this a perfect example of the bikeshed antipattern and moved on.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Lorne Kates said:

    Mozilla Developer's Mission Statement
     

    Oh jesus fucking McBuddah Christ. I was going to make a pithy post about "... then again, it's no surprise when you look at the top voted Firefox bugs on Bugzilla", and link to a Bugzilla report sorted by Vote Count (desc).

    Bug then I actually went to do that and-- oh God, just follow the link and click-to-sort on the Count column yourself:

    For those of you too lazy (in other words, all of you), here's a screen shot. As you gaze upon it, keep in mind that if this is the quality of the code in their BUG TRACKER, what hope does the rest of the project have:

    [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/995v8aw.png[/IMG]


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Ronald said:

    I would never have expected ESC to stop animated GIFs. IMHO this feedback from the thread sums it all:

    @Comment 9 said:

    We can't have Escape acting differently, because it violates the Law of Least Astonishment.

     

    So nothing changed for you.

    Everyone else that used that feature were quite Astonished to find that it suddenly stopped working after 18+ years.

    For no reason.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I think it's more ignoring the intent of the user in favor of the implementation of the feature.

    This. What Firefox is doing is iirc deleting all the data, including destroying the current session. However, any open tabs are retained and any state attached to those tabs are as well, but in some pseudo 'orphaned' state. When you close Firefox the entire state of the tabs is 'frozen' and shoved into an SQLite database. (Atleast that's what it used to be, not sure what it is these days as SQLite was on its way out.) The developers were probably not capable (or simply didn't care) to set the session serialization to disk up in such a way to discard these kind of orphaned data storages. The net result is that the data form these storages is fully reinstated (goes from 'orphaned' to 'adopted' if you will) when the old session is reloaded from the database.

    Just to verify; have you tried what it does with cookies, localStorage, etc. of sites that are not open when you clear all history? If it keeps those as well, you may have uncovered an even bigger leak of private data. (And yeah; that's really what it is. Imagine the damage this kind of thing can do on publicly accessed systems...)



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    For no reason.

    The reason is crappy web developers that don't know when to event.preventDefault(). And I see a lot of those. Now if only a quarter of the effort that is spent on trying to 'fix' JavaScript with stuff like CoffeeScript, Dart or (ick...) Go is instead spent on what is actually wrong; i.e. uneducated fuckwits letting code loose on the public premises of the internet, then this whole thing would be a non-issue...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ragnax said:

    SQLite was on its way out
    In favor of what?



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Hey, everyone. Here's a pop quiz. Let's say you're on a page and there's a bunch of animated gifs, probably in people's avatars and signatures. They're fun and all, but they're getting a bit annoying. You press ESC. What should happen?

    Randomly crash the browser.


    Did I pass? This was the Mozilla developer's employment test, right?



  • @Ronald said:

    I would never have expected ESC to stop animated GIFs.

    Apparently it's been a standard feature in browsers forever? I didn't know about it, but I didn't care, either. Still, the Law of Least Astonishment would be violated by changing the way ESC worked, when compared to every other browser ever and when compared to previous versions of Firefox.



  • @dkf said:

    @Ragnax said:
    SQLite was on its way out
    In favor of what?

    I already wrote; I'm not sure. I just remember SQLite being pulled out. Though if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the logical alternative is IndexedDB.



  • @dkf said:

    @Ragnax said:
    SQLite was on its way out
    In favor of what?

    Yeah, that's interesting. It wasn't that long ago they added SQLite, which was a "Huh? What? Why?" moment.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    Hey, everyone. Here's a pop quiz. Let's say you're on a page and there's a bunch of animated gifs, probably in people's avatars and signatures. They're fun and all, but they're getting a bit annoying. You press ESC. What should happen?

    Randomly crash the browser.


    Did I pass? This was the Mozilla developer's employment test, right?

     

    Sorry, that is not the right answer. However, you do qualify for being a UI developer for Outlook.com



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    So nothing changed for you.

    Everyone else that used that feature were quite Astonished to find that it suddenly stopped working after 18+ years.

    For no reason.

     

    All the noise about the EscapeGate on the Firefox and TDWTF forums has probably already wasted more CPU cycles than the handful of people knowing and using that feature would have saved in a lifetime by interrupting animated GIFs. From a global warming perspective, this is unacceptable. The first people to blame are of course the developers who pulled this feature, but from a sheer economics perspective it's now too late to go back and people insisting on bringing back this feature are hurting Gaia.







    STOP HURTING GAIA



  • Is this what this "Reset" button on my computer d--


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Ronald said:

     

    Your animated gif doesn't know how gravity works, therefore I reject your entire argument and deny that you even exist.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @cheapie said:

    Is this what this "Reset" button on my computer d--
     

         I     s           t     h     i     s           w     h     a     t           t     h     i     s           "     T     u     r     b     o     "           b     u     t     t     o     n           o     n           m     y           c     o     m     p     u     t     e     r           d     o     e     s     ?



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @cheapie said:

    Is this what this "Reset" button on my computer d--
     

         I     s           t     h     i     s           w     h     a     t           t     h     i     s           "     T     u     r     b     o     "           b     u     t     t     o     n           o     n           m     y           c     o     m     p     u     t     e     r           d     o     e     s     ?

    No, the turbo button is there to remind you that you are a cheapskate who buys old cases on eBay.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @cheapie said:
    Is this what this "Reset" button on my computer d--

    I          s                      t          h          i          s                      w          h          a          t                      t          h          i          s                      "          T          u          r          b          o          "                      b          u          t          t          o          n                      o          n                      m          y                      c          o          m          p          u          t          e          r                      d          o          e          s          ?


    Unicoded that for you



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @Ronald said:

     

    Your animated gif doesn't know how gravity works, therefore I reject your entire argument and deny that you even exist.

    Sure it does - there's a really really really big object directly above the image, and the earth is being held in place by a really strong wire.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @Ronald said:

     

    Your animated gif doesn't know how gravity works, therefore I reject your entire argument and deny that you even exist.

    What the fuck are you talking about? Gravity goes down. Antarctica is down.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    What the fuck are you talking about? Gravity goes down. Antarctica is down.

    If you look down and see Antarctica... well, that would explain your need for attention and mild psychosis.



  • Damn, disabling animations with QuickJava only stops the loading of future animated images, but not the current animations.



  • @Ronald said:

    @Lorne Kates said:

    @cheapie said:

    Is this what this "Reset" button on my computer d--
     

         I     s           t     h     i     s           w     h     a     t           t     h     i     s           "     T     u     r     b     o     "           b     u     t     t     o     n           o     n           m     y           c     o     m     p     u     t     e     r           d     o     e     s     ?

    No, the turbo button is there to remind you that you are a cheapskate who buys old cases on eBay.




  • @Comment 9 said:

    We can't have Escape acting differently, because it violates the Law of Least Astonishment.

    It astonishes me that if I press Esc before a page finishes loading, the text in the URL bar reverts to what it was before I typed; oftenly, blank.

     



  • @Ragnax said:

    @dkf said:
    @Ragnax said:
    SQLite was on its way out
    In favor of what?
    I already wrote; I'm not sure. I just remember SQLite being pulled out. Though if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the logical alternative is IndexedDB.
    What's being pulled out is "oh hey every website ever! want a SQLite DB? awesome, here's the same API as SQLite, only in JavaScript! Now don't go over 10 megs, ya hear?"

    IndexedDB is the annoying new* web API, and as a backend they use SQLite.
    * Actually, the W3C is trashing IndexedDB too, since every single browser that implemented IndexedDB used SQLite, and they only allow "multiple competing implementations".



  •  Something's wrong with your .gif. If I hit escape, the flames keep moving!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I think it's more ignoring the intent of the user in favor of the implementation of the feature.

    The timeline goes like this: "delete all data" -> "close browser (save session data on close)"

    When my INTENT was obviously to delete ALL data everywhere ever, and it should have done:

    "delete all data" -> "close browser (realize the user closed browser immediately after deleting all data, don't save session data because he obviously wants a fresh state)"

     

    I can not agree. When You selected  "delete all data", it do delete. Then while closing it save current state.

    Two not related operations.

     

    BTW if You really wanna full reset, just delete FF profile folder.

     

     



  • @spamcourt said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    I think it's more ignoring the intent of the user in favor of the implementation of the feature.

    The timeline goes like this: "delete all data" -> "close browser (save session data on close)"

    When my INTENT was obviously to delete ALL data everywhere ever, and it should have done:

    "delete all data" -> "close browser (realize the user closed browser immediately after deleting all data, don't save session data because he obviously wants a fresh state)"

     

    I can not agree. When You selected  "delete all data", it do delete. Then while closing it save current state.

    Two not related operations.

     

    BTW if You really wanna full reset, just delete FF profile folder.

     

     

    I think that "delete all data" should include the session data it saves on close.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    I think that "delete all data" should include the session data it saves on close.

    Hey Miff said something not stupid.

    Yes, I 100% agree, and that's exactly what I expected to happen. I'm sure that's what 99.9% of the population using that command would expect also.

    Now if I had said, "delete all data" and then kept browsing without closing the browser for, I dunno, a couple minutes-- then I'd be ok with it saving state. But if I close the browser immediately after deleting it, it should be fucking deleted.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ronald said:

    I would never have expected ESC to stop animated GIFs.

    See, the thing is, it's always done that in every browser ever, so the Principle of Least Astonishment is most violated by removing the behavior.

    Note that the workaround supplied is "here's some random extension that does that but also kills any pending network requests, which Esc doesn't do."



  • @FrostCat said:

    See, the thing is, it's always done that in every browser ever, so the Principle of Least Astonishment is most violated by removing the behavior.

    Note that the workaround supplied is "here's some random extension that does that but also kills any pending network requests, which Esc doesn't do."

    Chrome doesn't. On the contrary, "every browser ever" has killed any pending network requests on pressing escape, as it's tied to the stop button.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Really what it should have is IE's "reset EVERYTHING" button which not only clears all data, but also resets all preferences, security settings, and add-ins. But I couldn't find that.

    I don't know if there is a button for it, but in case you are in a mood today where you want to know a doable workaround to get what you want instead of just ranting, you can start firefox with "-profilemanager" command line switch and then choose to delete your whole profile and create a fresh one. It will also delete your phishing filter history and everything else you might have downloaded without knowing, but it resets everything.

    And in case you want to nit-pick: In case some adware installed an extension or plugin "for all users" it will still be there even if you wipe your user profile. And it will not downgrade your Firefox in case you installed an update.

    By the way, pretty useful feature if you want to copy your Firefox profile to a different machine without copying your whole Windows roaming profile, or in case you have multiple Firefox versions installed and want to run them simultaneously (each one in its own profile). I know, you can run multiple instances of IE without such crap (especially useful when opening more than one RDP connection to a terminal server using the same user credentials), but in case you need it with Firefox for some reason, the workaround of using multiple profiles works.

    And while we are ranting about Opera. If you choose to delete all history data in Opera, it will close all your tabs, remove all favicons of your bookmarks, stop all your downloads (and clear the recent downloads list so you cannot resume them) and delete all configuration of installed add-ons so you have to reconfigure them... (In later versions they provided separate checkboxes to choose what to delete, though)



  • @mihi said:

    start firefox with "-profilemanager" command line switch

    If the feature isn't usable or accessible it doesn't exist.

    Therefore, the "profile manager mode" (or whatever) does not exist.


  • Considered Harmful

    @blakeyrat said:

    If the feature isn't usable or accessible it doesn't exist.

    Hey, guys, good news: Oracle doesn't exist!



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    If the feature isn't usable or accessible it doesn't exist.

    Hey, guys, good news: Oracle doesn't exist!

    Good news, everybody! This website's contents are all fictional! They're just made-up horror stories with no basis in reality because bad things don't exist!



  • Fuck I hate you pedantic dickweed assholes. You know what I meant.


  • Considered Harmful

    @blakeyrat said:

    Fuck I hate you pedantic dickweed assholes. You know what I meant.

    Of course, you meant that if counter-evidence exists to your claim then it doesn't exist.

    IE has feature X! What's that, Firefox also has feature X? Well, it requires typing so it doesn't count.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    If the feature isn't usable or accessible it doesn't exist.

    Therefore, the "profile manager mode" (or whatever) does not exist.

     

    Help -> Troubleshooting -> Reset Firefox. That might work. Or not. Who knows. But at least it isn't a command line switch.

    And I have to agree that the command line switch is utter bullcrunk.  I've been working on Windows personally and professionally every day for the past, what, fifteen years? I don't think I could even begin to tell you how to add a command line switch to a program. I think you'd have to edit the shortcut, but without looking or googling, I couldn't confidently say the shortcut lets you do that.  And I couldn't say if you did it in one place, would it ripple to the icon in the start menu, in the task bar, on the desktop, etc.

    It should be unbelievably trivially easy for them to add Tools -> Profile Manager. Hell, I'm almost certain Seamonkey has/had that option back in the day. It's just bad.

     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @MiffTheFox said:

    @FrostCat said:
    See, the thing is, it's always done that in every browser ever, so the Principle of Least Astonishment is most violated by removing the behavior.

    Note that the workaround supplied is "here's some random extension that does that but also kills any pending network requests, which Esc doesn't do."

    Chrome doesn't.

    Yeah, I discovered that after posting. I'd never noticed--all my computers (since Chrome came out) have enough memory and CPU that I haven't needed to stop animations lately.

    @MiffTheFox said:

    On the contrary, "every browser ever" has killed any pending network requests on pressing escape, as it's tied to the stop button.

    Hmm. Yeah, I thought that was wrong when I wrote it but didn't want to go back to the FF bug page. The point was that the extension the FF devs were plugging was not an exact replacement for the old behavior, in that it either did or didn't do something else that Esc doesn't or does do.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Help -> Troubleshooting -> Reset Firefox. That might work. Or not. Who knows. But at least it isn't a command line switch.
    That will nuke your profile.  Which will most likely fix your problem, but its probably not what you want.  Making the profile manager only accessable from a command line switch is one of those retarded things that just makes no sense. @Lorne Kates said:
    It should be unbelievably trivially easy for them to add Tools -> Profile Manager. Hell, I'm almost certain Seamonkey has/had that option back in the day. It's just bad.
    I seem to remember that back in the olden days, Firefox and the Mozilla Suite, which predated Firefox and was later renamed Seamonkey, used to install two shortcuts.  One for the program and one with the profile manager switch added.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    Help -> Troubleshooting -> Reset Firefox. That might work. Or not. Who knows. But at least it isn't a command line switch.
    That will nuke your profile.  Which will most likely fix your problem, but its probably not what you want.  Making the profile manager only accessable from a command line switch is one of those retarded things that just makes no sense.

    While I agree with that last statement, what exactly can you do with the profile manager, given that your current profile is fucked the hell up, other than nuking the profile?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So I use Firefox as a secondary browser so I don't get my RobotsInTheNews login cookies mixed up with my other Google account's login cookies.

    This might help.



  • Hardly. That just guarantees you'll fuck up your YouTube upload because an hour in you decided to check your email.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Hardly. That just guarantees you'll fuck up your YouTube upload because an hour in you decided to check your email.

    Nope, it uses /u/0, /u/1, /u/2, etc.

    I can be on different accounts on different tabs and there's no problem.


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