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

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!

4 comments

Must’ve frustrated them when they were a toddler.
- The kind of bug that makes you shit yourself.
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!
- This summary is terrible and misses basically all of the context. I encourage anyone interested to just read the article (it’s like a 2 minute read) and not this comment