Tiny text boxes, lingering on screens like ghosts, exorcised after 2 decades.
  • Semi-Hemi-Demigod
    98•2 years ago

    This is what open source is all about: See a problem with your tool, fix it yourself, and everyone enjoys the improvements.

    • fmstratEnglish
      20•2 years ago

      While the fix has created some regression, that bug is seeing work, too.

      And this is why devs don’t often focus on the minor issues. Haha. Good stuff.

      To be clear, I love this story and kudos to Yifan Zhu for the initiative. Let’s normalize crediting people properly

    • fmstratEnglish
      6•2 years ago

      From here out when a tooltip disappears, I will say it Zhu’d away.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    30•2 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips.

    “I just searched for ‘tooltip’ in the entire code base, examined stuff for possible candidates, and inserted debugging print statements to follow the execution,” Zhu wrote.

    The timer would be canceled on a mouse-out event, which Firefox wasn’t getting when I used keyboard shortcuts to switch windows or virtual desktops."

    Zhu pushed a commit that made tooltip display based on Firefox losing focus, rather than the mouse leaving the application.

    Cobos Álvarez, who shepherded Zhu’s fix into a commit, wrote to us that “this area is rather tricky,” given various Firefox configurations and how they respond to different operating systems.

    On social media, especially the Mastodon instances where you might expect to find people with opinions on Mozilla’s XML User Interface Language, there was much rejoicing.

    The original article contains 864 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • @vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      21•2 years ago

      For fuck’s sake, this is actually the most annoying FF bug I’ve noticed and it is important for me!

      You guys mean it’s been fixed now?

      Wow.

  • @wraithcoop@lemmy.oneEnglish
    23•2 years ago

    Makes sense, motivation is very powerful. It helps to also not be jaded from years of working in the area.