Tag: testing

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Firefox has been testing a new release that detects and closes crashed plugins (instead of letting them crash Firefox entirely) for several months, carefully making sure everything was working before they released Firefox 3.6.4 last week.

Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie wondered if the beta testers hadn’t been testing the limits.

You want to know what convinced Mozilla to issue an update so quickly?

Farmville.

Apparently Firefox was detecting Farmville as frozen and closing it. It turns out that on many computers, Farmville regularly freezes up the browser for longer than 10 seconds, and its players just deal with it and wait for it to come back. Mozilla decided that the simplest thing to do would be to increase the time limit.

What this tells me is that the type of person willing to beta-test a web browser these days is not likely to be playing Farmville — or if they are, it’s likely to be on a bleeding-edge computer that can handle it without 10-second freezes.

In more practical terms: Mozilla needs to convince a wider variety of users to help test their software!

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A quick request, if I may: If you have a web-capable cell phone, would you please try to view this blog in it and let me know how it appears? I’m testing some plugins that should optimize the page for desktop, low-end mobile, and high-end mobile devices.

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

  • What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
  • Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
  • Does it look like..
    1. The desktop version of the site (photo banner across top, full sidebar, complete posts on front page)
    2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by WordPress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
    3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, headlines on main page that expand to excerpts, dark banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
  • Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
  • Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

  • Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
  • Send me a Twitter direct message.
  • Email me at kelson – [at] – pobox – [dot] – com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

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I’ve been experimenting with tags, particularly aimed at Technorati, and I rather like being able to add ad-hoc categories and (I hope) increase the visibility of some posts. I’ve rigged up some style rules (that so far only work in Gecko and KHTML-based browsers, since they rely on the substring attribute selector from CSS3 and no one else has implemented that yet), but typing out <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/whatever" rel="tag">whatever</a> over and over has gotten tiresome. Enter Bunny’s Technorati Tags, which automatically handles them using WordPress’ extensible custom fields. No muss, no fuss, just type in the words in another form field.

One thing I haven’t figured out yet: since the list is separated by spaces, how do you specify a multi-word tag like “Internet Explorer”?

To be honest, this post only exists because I want to test it, and because there seems to be a tradition of “I just installed this neat new plugin” posts. Continue reading →