Indistinguishable from Jesse http://www.squarefree.com Jesse Ruderman on Firefox, security, and more Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:23:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 en Earth complaint department http://www.squarefree.com/2008/04/23/earth-complaint-department/ http://www.squarefree.com/2008/04/23/earth-complaint-department/#comments Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:23:51 +0000 Jesse Ruderman http://www.squarefree.com/?p=391 Finally, a bug-tracking system for everything. The priorities, severities, products, and components are great.

]]> http://www.squarefree.com/2008/04/23/earth-complaint-department/feed/ TidyBox http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/23/tidybox/ http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/23/tidybox/#comments Sun, 24 Feb 2008 03:24:16 +0000 Jesse Ruderman http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/23/tidybox/ The Firefox Tinderbox has been unmanageably wide lately. I wrote a Greasemonkey script, TidyBox, to fix it by moving build results from the table cells to popups that appear when hovering the table cells.

Looking at a screenshot with TidyBox, it's easy to see that exactly one box is orange and that the orange started after the last checkin. With the normal Tinderbox display at the same time, you would probably have to scroll both horizontally and vertically to figure that out.

If you want to see the information about a build while using TidyBox, just hover over the cell. To click links that appear in the popup, click the cell to lock the popup in place and then click the link.

Install TidyBox today and you might never have to scroll Tinderbox again!

Other recent efforts to improve Tinderbox:

]]> http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/23/tidybox/feed/ Help combat global warming http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/12/help-combat-global-warming/ http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/12/help-combat-global-warming/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:45:57 +0000 Jesse Ruderman http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/12/help-combat-global-warming/ Mike Shaver and Johnny Stenback are doing their part. Are you?

]]> http://www.squarefree.com/2008/02/12/help-combat-global-warming/feed/ Crashtests http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/crashtests/ http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/crashtests/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:40:15 +0000 Jesse Ruderman http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/crashtests/ Crashtest is Mozilla's newest test suite. It provides a very simple way to make sure a page doesn't cause Gecko to crash (or hang or assert or leak). Since I report a lot of crash and assertion and leak bugs, I've been looking forward to being able to use this test suite. (For some bugs, I had been using "== about:blank" and "!= about:blank" reftests, but most of my bugs weren't getting tests checked in at all.)

I spent most of last week making crashtests for old bugs I had reported and checking them in.

So far, these crashtests have found bug 409150, a crash on Windows that happens on Tinderbox but not dveditz's computer, and bug 408746, a crash on Linux that happens on sayrer's computer but not on Tinderbox. They also found a problem in a patch before it was checked in.

The value of crashtests (and reftests) goes beyond keeping regressions out of nightlies. The test suites can be run under Valgrind's Memcheck, potentially finding subtle memory safety bugs that don't normally show up as crashes. The pages can even be used outside of the normal test framework, for example for finding inconsistent-rendering bugs.

]]> http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/crashtests/feed/ Fixing leaks http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/fixing-leaks/ http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/fixing-leaks/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:21:23 +0000 Jesse Ruderman http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/fixing-leaks/ Lately, I've been running debug builds of Firefox with trace-refcnt summaries enabled and reporting any leaks I can reproduce. Frequently, someone else quickly attaches a patch, but in the case of bug 401393, nobody else could reproduce the leak I was seeing. For me, simply loading a page with Flash and scrolling down could leak several objects.

Boris helped me use more detailed trace-refcnt logging options to figure out what caused the leak, and then Jonas assigned the bug to me:

Jesse, here's your first blocker :)

Let me know if you need help and I'll do my best.

I was able to fix the leak, although I still don't understand much of the code for the class I modified. Boris and I also figured out why not everyone could reproduce the leak: it only happened because I was using Greasemonkey, which implements nsIContentPolicy using JavaScript. (Adblock Plus does the same, and it is apparently the most popular Firefox extension, so I'm glad this leak is fixed!)

Knowing how to debug leaks with trace-refcount logging turned out to be useful: I was able to fix a few editor leaks and debug another.

]]> http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/27/fixing-leaks/feed/ Mozilla 2 thread http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/19/mozilla-2-thread/ http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/19/mozilla-2-thread/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:36:20 +0000 Jesse Ruderman http://www.squarefree.com/2007/12/19/mozilla-2-thread/ There's an interesting thread on mozilla.dev.planning about the scope and schedule of Mozilla 2.

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