
The case of the disappearing favicon - kilian
http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/javascript/the-case-of-the-disappearing-favicon/
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kleiba
I think this post is indicative of a problem that arises when a project such
as firefox becomes too big. Sure, it is an open source project, so it is nice
that you can file a bug report if you discover a shortcoming like the
disappearing favicon.

But the author of the blog seems to be a programmer himself. Ideally, he would
not only file a bug report but - since the bug seems to bother him a lot -
perhaps even come up with a patch.

Instead, he writes a work-around -- and can you blame him? Compared to a two-
line function, the work required to dig into a huge code base, try to
understand it, come up with a patch (that doesn't break anything else), get
the maintainers to integrate it, etc... seems enormous. Well, perhaps it
actually isn't, who knows, but I can understand that people feel too inhibited
to invest time to come up with a patch if the required effort seems so
overwhelming from the start.

It appears to me that this is a general problem, and the bigger the code base,
the worse it gets. Yet at the same time, the overall benefit of submitting a
patch rather than coming up with workarounds grows with an increasing user
base, because more people are positively affected. So I wonder if there are
any realistic methods to cope with this problem: how can open source projects
get people to provide more patches?!

~~~
profquail
Things like this make me wonder why anyone would want to write a huge project
(like Firefox) in C/C++. I can understand wanting to re-use some legacy code,
or perhaps the need for a few bits of optimized, low-level code where you
really need the performance...but why not write the majority of the code in
something like OCaml? I know there aren't as many good OCaml (for example)
developers out there, but I'd bet that the end result would be just as fast
(or faster) than the C/C++ version and have way fewer bugs (thanks to the
strong type inference and succinctness of the code).

~~~
k33n
If Firefox were an OCaml project, it would have likely died before hitting
1.0.

Also, I've never used OCaml, so maybe I'm wrong here, but I highly doubt it's
faster than C.

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ck2
It also took them a few years to include the patch for HttpOnly (proposed in
2002, implemented 2008).

Really strange how long some things take to fix in Firefox, I wonder if it's
politics or apathy, impossible to tell.

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bnoland
Out of curiosity, why would one set window.location.hash?

~~~
bcl
In order to maintain the usability of the URL in a heavily AJAX application.

For example, with movielandmarks I designed it so that you don't use
back/forward at all. But I wanted to provide a useful URL for bookmarking and
sharing with friends. So I used the hash for this because changing the actual
URL of the page forces a refresh.

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Shorel
One more reason for me to keep using Opera. Thanks.

