Silver's Simple Site - Weblog - 2005 - August

FTS? Whatever, Mozilla Update is not doing itself any favours. Apparently (according to the developers' page) version 1.0.1 of my extension was denied, despite it being a simple bug-fix over 1.0.0 (which was approved). Naturally there is no indication as to the reason. I would check my mail, but I can't. I've waited two (or is it three now?) days to get this far, and it sucks.

What really worries me is that it may have been denied just because it was a different reviewer. "How does that work?" I hear you ask. Simple. My extension, while small at only 5KB, does a lot of poking at the Windows Registry to do its job. This is not trivial stuff, and it is known to not always work (I can't find any platform/setup locally that fails, however, which doubly-sucks). Version 1.0.1 is better at working that 1.0.0 - it actually fixes a very specific bug for Firefox 1.0.x users, for example.

Yet all it takes is one reviewer who has a system where it happens to not work and all the users lose out. Bring on the multi-reviewer system - oh, and a few times more reviewers too.

So Gecko 1.8 is branching on Friday, and there are only 126 bugs to fix before tomorrow night. Good luck!

Update: Oops, seems they're using bug 300860 to track blocking for the branch, so only two bugs left. This will be very amusing, however, when they realise they have a branch with 120 bugs to fix on it.

So the RSS button is gone from the statusbar, and now appears inside the URLBar. Yes, you heard me (and saw, too). So we now have a less-discoverable, less accessible, less flexible solution (no popup menu with a list of feeds any more!). And to top it all off, they are viewed in a hacked-up badly-integrated version of the Feedview extension (note: I have no idea if the Feedview extension suffers from any of the same issues as Firefox does, and don't mean to imply such), meaning you get suck and more suck, including such gems as bug 302749.