Present Perfect

Every time I read the wonderful Dinosaur Comics, I'm reminded of a particularly excellent bike shedding case in the form of this Firefox bug spawned from this Seamonkey bug.

The actual bug is so wonderfully simple - some versions of Firefox (or, all versions before 3.0, which effectively means any stable version of Firefox ever) ellipsize the ending of "long" mouseover text on images. Pretty much all the DC comics have a longer-than-average sentence in their mouseovers.

Because the bug is so simple - and the natural fix is so straightforward - it's so easy to comment on this bug that everyone and their dog come up with several arguments to not do the natural fix, and the rest of the world comment on how stupid it is to not fix the bug.

Apparently this bug, that was open since 2000 and present in Firefox 1 and 2, is fixed for Firefox 3. Obviously it's not going to be backported to Firefox 2 because it's not a security fix.

I don't know who to sympathize with. I understand Mozilla wants to follow a process to keep its sanity in developing such a big project. And I'm sure there are excellent reasons why the straightforward fix never got implemented in those 8 years. So I don't want to either praise or condemn them for it.

But today I googled around a little for how other people deal with not being able to read their favourite comic - so I arrived at this long lines extension that I hadn't seen before. Now I can stop caring about the bike shed color and enjoy even more dinosaur humor.

And in today's batch, DC mentions a pet peeve: don't utilize utilize people. And this right after an hour session of GTA4 no less! Freak accident.

Every time I read the wonderful Dinosaur Comics, I'm reminded of a particularly excellent bike shedding case in the form of this Firefox bug spawned from this Seamonkey bug. The...