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Bug of the moment 2007-11-17


Some of the bugs I encounter are really quite unbelievable. I’ve mentioned Mozilla’s text engine enough times before, but some of the bugs are relatively rare and hard to screenshot, although no less incredulous. The following screenshot comes from a Thunderbird 2 message composition window:

Making corrections to the last line of a paragraph (pressing backspace and retyping) tends to trigger the random-insertion-of-newline bug where you suddenly find yourself on a new line. A much more rare bug is depicted above. The circled text started out where I’ve indicated, but making a correction to the end of that final line triggered the text engine to pick up some random text from earlier in the line and move it to the start of the paragraph.

Try to explain that one away, I challenge you.

I cannot stress enough that it is Thunderbird that needs to be worked on, not Firefox. Firefox 2 is a pretty solid program, although a version 2.1 that doesn’t panic and bail out on log out would be great. But Thunderbird 2 (that is, 1.5.1 in realistic figures: 1.5 with a facelift) is still where Firefox was at version 1.0.7 – buggy and strange. Firefox has come up a very long way since then, and version 3 looks set to be another milestone. It is Thunderbird however that needs all the attention right now.

The site in question, by the way, is drag0nette’s LiveJournal, which has become a remarkable diary about keeping pet spiders, with excellent macro photography.


Posted 17th November 2007 – Comments and questions?