Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kelnos 714 days ago
Not sure why this is big news, big enough to be in the #1 spot right now. From reading the comments on the bug, it seems to be an issue that's hard to reliably reproduce, and -- despite how simple it sounds from the editorialized HN title -- it involves interactions between different parts of the browser, and it's hard to track down and fix.

Nonetheless, there are some proposed fixes, and I expect a near-future release will have one of them.

This isn't that stereotypical "simple bug has been sitting around unresolved for years because (arrogant|understaffed|uncaring) developers can't be bothered" story that is unfortunately all too common in software (and not just open source software -- we just don't get to see it on a public bug tracker when it's in a proprietary product).

This is the process working.

6 comments

This post has 100 points right now and there are already 10+ people in the comments saying they have experienced it. Given the typical distribution of lurkers, I’d say a good proportion of the votes come directly from people who think they’re affected. Probably more people wrongly attribute this kind of annoyance to websites. Bugs in popular software just affect more people, hard to reproduce or not.

Not sure why you’re so defensive and eager to shut it down that you have to post a barrage of comments to this thread, including saying roughly the same things in three comments.

I don't agree. This is something so basic that there isn't, from a Q&A standpoint, a justification for it ending up broken for 2/3rds of a year, and where the kind of hard-line stance Linus takes against certain kinds of regressions is warranted. Also consider that a lot of users have been unhappy for years with how the foundation is running and spending money (e.g., more and more on things unrelated to FF, like this: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...).
>it seems to be an issue that's hard to reliably reproduce

You say that like the unreliability is the result of some extrinsic influence like the weather or unfair portrayal of the project by journalists and not a strong sign that the project has unmanageable tech debt or does not have the human resources necessary for the difficult task of competing with Chrome.

This is a bug in a very obvious location that is triggered, in my experience, all the time.

It's easy enough to work around, but it's also just terrible optics. Why does something like this take the better part of a year to fix?

i thought i was crazy but had enough times where copying didn't work and i thought it was my computer but seems i wasn't crazy
If anyone is curious about another 'fun' Windows only bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1856462