How a 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug

I remember finding a bug in the Linux kernel re AMD processors a very, very long time ago. I documented and reported it and later saw the report in a changelog or something. Still riding high off that 25 years later (I think, it's been a while).

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!