So I noticed that Firefox updated itself again today, only a few days after it did last time. Why the short time-lapse between Firefox 3.6.4 and 3.6.6? Just one bug: 574905.
The Farmville Bug
No joke, Firefox pushed an update on a single bug. Last release they introduced this great feature that times out Flash applications if they take longer than 10 seconds to start up, thinking that anything that takes longer than that is probably crashing. Reasonable!
But Farmville often takes longer than 10 seconds to start up. Oh shoot. Flash developers that do run-time debugging destroy the 10 second limit. Double shoot!
Use Real Data!
It’s a cut-and-dry example of why you should use real data to make calls on design decisions. It’s a variation of the Lorem Ipsum Sucks argument. The “10 second” decision seems arbitrary, and kudos to Mozilla for doing the right thing and releasing a fix right away. It’s probably not the correct fix, as adding a friendly user prompt would be preferable to a low, fixed timeout. But hey, baby steps.
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