Firefox 24 vs OS/2 World

[Neil Waldhauer]

I got the new Firefox 24 beta running here. But it's claiming every word I type in the composition box is misspelled. I know I'm not the greatest speller, but how can I correct my mistakes if all of them come up?

[dbanet]

https://github.com/bitwiseworks/mozilla-os2/issues/69

[Roderick Klein]

I got the new Firefox 24 beta running here. But it's claiming every word I type in the composition box is misspelled. I know I'm not the greatest speller, but how can I correct my mistakes if all of them come up?

Come on Neil you should no better. I did not read the bug list on Gidhub but check if the bug report exits already or open a bug report in the proper place if that has not been done yet.

Roderick Klein

[Dave Yeo]

Boris already referred to the bug report. It is good though to make sure that it is not a local problem by seeing if others can reproduce it before filing a report otherwise there is too much noise.

[Neil Waldhauer]

I think discussion of Firefox 24 is a reasonable thing to have on OS/2 World. I don't think its healthy for a platform to do all of it's discussion inside bug reporting websites. I do file bug reports, as some of you should probably know.

I'm running Firefox 24 for my daily web browsing. If I hit a page with a lot of Flash animation, the operating system appears to halt. Control-Alt-Del does not appear to work, or else I am not patient enough. There is some middle ground -- if a page has just enough Flash animations, then Firefox stops, but it can be killed from CADH/TOP.

With Flash disabled from the add-ons menu in Firefox, I can browse the same pages. It may be a bit slow, but they work. This had not been the case for Firefox 17 or Firefox 10. They could not reliably disable the Flash plugin, nor could they render nasty, overweight pages without hanging.

As an end user, there is no way to know if this would be better a Flash bug or a Firefox bug. Nor is it clear how to submit a reproducable scenario, since the web pages in question change every few minutes, depending on what is embedded in them (which probably depends on the user's cookies anyway.)

[Dave Yeo]

I agree that we need discussion outside of bug reports, ideally somewhere the developers hang out. It used to be the mozilla newsgroup and still is to an extend.
Firefox 24 should end up being the our best browser in a long time as we have a good developer putting in a lot of time and now the tool chain is good enough to debug, something that went away during the run up to FF4.
I do have to say that you're very brave using no protection on todays web, especially using a Flash plugin that is littered with known vulnerabilities on a browser that also has enough known vulnerabilities (just need to look at what's been fixed between 24.3 and 24.5).
While I'd guess what you're seeing are flaws in our Flash implantation, there is a very real possibility that it is sites (usually actually ads) attempting to take advantage of security holes. While the odds of doing much is small, the odds of crashing, hanging etc are much larger.
There are also other vulnerabilities, some of which can affect us as much as other platforms, JavaScript code that can spy on other tabs, the cache and history for example.
I'd really suggest using protection (amongst others I use noscript) when browsing and only allowing Flash and even JavaScript to run when you need it and trust the site. Ads are particularly bad as they are usually hosted somewhere totally different and the web master has little control over the actual ads