Indistinguishable from Jesse

Testers can now download debug builds of Firefox rather than going trough the complicated process of building Firefox themselves.

Debug builds have extra code called assertions to inform us when assumptions or surrounding code are incorrect. For example, assertions can reliably tell us when third-party code makes common threading mistakes, even though the crashes from those mistakes appear random. I find about a third of my bugs by noticing assertion failures, and it usually isn't the assertion that's incorrect.

In several bug reports from users who were hitting frequent crashes at random, I suggested that the users compile their own debug builds, hoping that assertion failure messages would lead us to the cause of the crash. Few of the users succeeded, since the compilation tools and instructions were written with programmers in mind. Now that pre-made debug builds are available, we may be able to make more progress on these kinds of crash bug reports.

Big thanks to the release engineering team for making these builds available!

Reed Loden set up bugzil.la as a redirect for Bugzilla bugs and searches. Examples:

• http://bugzil.la/95849
• http://bugzil.la/468562#c12
• http://bugzil.la/firebug+crash
• http://bugzil.la/ALL+flag:in-litmus?

I put together a demo of incrementing numbers in URLs by scrolling.

Hopefully it's not considered a bug that I can use rangeOffset for a text node "inside" a textbox ;) Trying to access rangeParent throws a security exception.

This could be used by an extension like URL Flipper as a shortcut for changing specific numbers in URLs.

Getting Things Done recommends spending an hour or two on a "weekly review" every Friday afternoon. This worked for me at first, but after a month, I found myself procrastinating more often than actually doing a weekly review. Ironically, another concept from the same book helped me understand some of the reasons.

A major problem with my old weekly review checklist was that it included things I had to do in different contexts. For example, I can only check snail mail at home, but I can only check voice mail when I'm not at home. Worse, performing a weekly review seemed to require concentrating on one thing for an hour, and I'd rather spend that concentration on programming.

I decided to split my weekly review into a list of weekly sanity reminders, with each reminder on appropriate day of the week. I chose Monday for reviewing actions assigned to specific contexts, since the contexts "office" and "business-hours" usually become available on Monday. But I review coding projects later in the week, when distractions have died down.

For many of the smaller parts of my old weekly review, such as making sure my iPhone's voicemail list is empty, I chose a day of the week on which a mid-day meeting breaks up my day.

Splitting my weekly review into multiple scheduled items allowed me to put some reminders on the days when they do the most good, and others on the days when distractions do the least harm.

Like the author of GTD, I found that doing each of these things once a week helps me focus on the right projects and avoid some forms of procrastination. They just don't all need to be done on the same day.

Yesterday, I subscribed to the hg feed for reftest.js in Google Reader. Today, Google Reader informed me of a change Mats made. It works!

My newest Greasemonkey script, Buglist in input order, lets you sort a bug list according to an order external to Bugzilla.

For example, you can view the list of bugs related to topcrashes sorted by how common each crash is. First, load the list of Firefox 3.5.3 topcrashes. Second, use the "collect buglinks" bookmarklet to view a bug list consisting of the bug numbers listed there. Third, click the "#" added by this Greasemonkey script to sort the bugs by their order on the topcrash page.

Hopefully, this script will allow us to avoid duplicating information between Bugzilla and CrashKill wiki pages, and thus reduce the risk of information in both places becoming out of date.

Limi and Gruber recently wrote about what application developers can do to make installing Mac apps easier. All the choices have serious downsides:

• Disk images take many steps, and many things can go wrong.
• Zip files leave you wondering what to do, especially if you use a browser other than Safari.
• Installers have a reputation for being sneaky (on Windows) or indicating that an application will require elevated privileges (on Mac).

What can browsers do to make some of these choices suck less, and make installing Mac apps easier?

Here's what I'd like to see: when you download a zip containing just an application, the browser offers to "install" it for you rather than just leaving it in the downloads folder. It could even do the same for disk images that contain nothing other than an application and a shortcut to /Applications.

Install applications only from authors whom you trust.

Malicious software can damage your computer or violate your privacy.

You clicked a link from http://adium.im/ that downloads an application called "Adium". Move it to /Applications and:

[x] Add to dock
[ ] Add to desktop
[ ] Launch now (if unchecked, reveal in finder)

Cancel / Install Now

Done right, this could be both easier and safer for users than leaving software in the user's Downloads directory.

Today is the second crash bug triage day. Can we beat the first one's record of resolving 104 crash bugs and identifying several important, valid bugs?

(Short, time-specific blog posts feel weird now. You should follow me on Twitter.)