Update on Firefox problem

[J]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 00:48, irlandes <brucemcgovern at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I finally had some time, not a lot, but some. My schedule involves
> spending more time using my computer for forum moderation; book
> production; and photo retouching; with testing as a second priority.

Heh... I think we all suffer from that ailment from time to time...
mine involves writing and reading bugs on Launchpad, ISO testing and
hardware testing, and writing code to extend the test suite
(checkbox), plus everything else the boss tells me to do, though I
must admit that these days I have more play time than I did in the
past :-)

Off topic a bit, but what kind of book production work do you do? Copy
editing, or writing, or print setting, or something else?  And what
kind of photo retouching do you do?  I'm still using Lightroom and
Photoshop for that (though Lightroom more than anything else)...

> I tried putting in another "stable" version, which somehow ended up
> being 3.6.4pre with the different name. Still messed up scrolling on my
> Dell Vostro A860 laptop, and Kubuntu 9.10.
>
> I put my 10.04 flash drive on, scrolled solid as a rock, and upgraded
> Firefox to 3.6.4. Scrolling solid as a rock.

For what it's worth, at this point 10.04 is frozen.  The only changes
made between this point and release at the end of the month should be
bug fixes.  What you see now with 10.04 should be pretty much what
you'll see once Lucid is golden.

I've been running Lucid on my production system for a couple of weeks
now and have had no problems with it beyond minor annoyances, and I've
not seen anything like what you saw with Firefox.

> And, I conclude there is a serious problem with Kubuntu 9.10. on my
> machine. I do not know where to start, there is nothing much there that
> was not installed with 9.10 during set up, and re-installing 9.10 this
> close to 10.04 final is not an option at all.

Well, honestly, though I'd rather people move to 10.04, 9.10 isn't
going anywhere for a little while yet, at least, though it will EOL
(end of life) in a year when 11.04 is released.  You can see all the
different releases and their lifespans here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

> I got some communications on this. One man said I should not call it
> disgusting, but should be writing bug reports on it.  I tended to agree,
> but now I am not sure I do.

You still shouldn't.  Here's my point behind that, it's just plain
negative, and really doesn't help anything at all.  As I mentioned in
my response, I have had no issues like what you're mentioning, on any
Ubuntu with any Firefox I've tried since I started regularly using it
with 8.04 LTS.

My point was, my single experience is not a representative sample, and
neither is yours.  If the problem you experienced was some horrible
problem with Firefox, there would have been a LOT more complaints
about it.  What you described is an utter failure in usability (not to
mention the stability problems such issues cause).  But you are the
only person I've seen mention this, here or elsewhere.

Thus my suggestion that this is not necessarily a Firefox problem, but
could be to a mis-behaving plugin, or java problem on websites, or any
number of other issues.  It could even be that you're running too many
things and what you're seeing is actually just an artifact of the
system being a bit overloaded, causing low priority things to have to
wait.  When that happens, everything you do within Firefox is
buffered.  In other words, every thing you do goes into a list that
gets executed once the processor or kernel has time to do it.

SO, if you try scrolling down a page by clicking the down arrow 100
times, you'll end up with a list of 100 line down operations that then
all get executed after something else is run, which makes it seem that
the browser just pauses and then jumps down 100 lines.

And if, in your frustration/confusion, you start scrolling up as well,
and clicking here and there before that buffer has a chance to be read
and executed, then Firefox (or any other program for that matter that
this effects) will do some very weird things.

One thing you can do is run a monitor.  You can run top in a terminal
window and see what processes are taking up the most resources at any
given moment.  You could also try gkrellm which is pretty
customizable.  You could try the "system monitor" from the menu, but
I've found that it's not always accurate (the process list usually is,
but the other things like processor activity monitor are a bit
lacking).

That at least can give you a clue.

Once you see if it is indeed firefox doing things, start removing
plugins, one by one, until you get it to stop.  Barring that, go back
to an older version of Firefox and see if you have the same issues...
This is all part of the debugging process.


> First, though many of you with much more experience with bugs may have
> forgotten, it takes some practice to write bug reports efficiently. I
> wrote exactly one, which has been fixed, and with all the things
> required to write the first bug, it took many hours. When I find a solid
> one, I will work at it again, and after several, I will also be able to
> casually investigate existing bug reports and input one if not there
> already.

There's no reason why writing a bug should take you many hours in most
cases.  I know you want to be a thorough as possible, and believe me,
I certainly appreciate that attention to detail.  BUT in reality,
sometimes just opening the bug with as much info as you have at that
moment is good enough.  At that, at least it's open and someone can
look at it.  If they need more info from you, they will most
definitely ask for specific things.

You can open the bug using apport from a terminal, like this:
'apport-bug <program name>' which will open the bug (you'll still have
to add description and title) and also automatically attach some log
files and such.  That'll get you a good start, and like I said, if
something is missing, believe me, they will ask for what they need.


> Second, what on earth do I report? I don't even know where to start.  A
> problem somewhere in 9.10 which causes bad Firefox scrolling?  Yeah,
> right.

That sound's pretty good... a title something like this:

9.10 Firefox UI is very unstable - pages jump around and controls are
sometimes unresponsive

Then in the comments, describe what you're doing, what you saw, what
you expect to see, and if you know, what versions you were running
(e.g. Ubuntu 9.10 with latest updates as of 7 April 2010 and Firefox
3.6.3).

That's usually all they really need to get started, unless you happen
to notice core dumps in /var/crash, or tracebacks or kernel oopses in
the log files or something like that...

As you get used to writing them, and reading others, you'll get used
to what you need and don't need, and writing them gets a lot faster.

> There is still a problem with 9.10 Gwenview CROP function on some
> computers. We spotted it right away, and the developer wrote a fix
> really fast, and requested it be shipped via (bug updates?). Months
> later, that has not been done, and I would say it is not going to be
> done, so 9.10 Gwenview will run through it's support cycle with no fix
> shipped. The problem is fixed in 10.04 but 9.10 has a considerable
> remaining life expectancy.

The answer here is to find that bug, or open another that points to
the report showing where it was fixed and ask them to push an update
to 9.10.

A quick search on Launchpad for 'gwenview' shows a lot of bugs, but a
search for 'gwenview crop' showed me nothing, so either there is no
bug on Launchpad that matches both those terms, or I'm just not
searching for the right things.

But in any case, if you know the original bug, and know it hasn't been
fixed for 9.10, open it and add a comment stating so.

> So, I have not bothered to report a multiple crash problem in digikam
> 9.10. It is also fixed in 10.04, but will also be out there through the
> support life of 9.10.

Again, you need to report this... that's the only way things get
fixed, or even looked at.  Find the bug for 10.04, and add your
comments and be sure to make it clear that this issue is also
affecting 9.10 and needs to be back ported.

> Since 10.04 is looking good, I am dealing with this problem until then
> by installing Opera which is also solid as a rock on scrolling.
>
> Another suggestion was that I install 3.7 daily build on my main
> computer. I checked and it reported failed build.  I suspect it is a
> really bad idea to install a daily build on a main computer.

It's not a really bad idea, usually, just not a suggested idea, unless
you don't mind dealing with beta level software that's still being
actively patched and pushed.

> If I had an idea where to start, I'd try to look into the 9.10 problems
> causing this problem, but I don't.  And, with 10.04 coming out in a few
> days, I suspect there won't be much attention given by anyone here.

You'd be incorrect there... 9.10 will have plenty of attention until
April 2011.  The place to start would be to file bugs, and as I
mentioned before, they don't have to be long, drawn out dissertations,
just put what you can in them, and the QA team will ask you for
whatever else they need in order to recreate and investigate.

> The reason I volunteered to test 10.04, with little experience, is
> because 9.10 just had too many problems, and this is merely another one.
> I am hoping my first impression of 10.04 being much better than 9.10
> holds true.

There's no problem with that... you get experience by doing, and
that's what you're doing.  You're learning.  Welcome to the club!  We
all started out with little experience at some point.  Don't let
frustration get the better of you.

FWIW, the only issues I've ever had with 9.10 was getting my broadcom
wireless card to work.  An update fixed that after I opened a bug
against both the STA and WL drivers... but I've run it on a Lenovo
S-10 netbook, an Alienware M15x laptop, and a home-build 10 year old
Athlon XP server and have really not had any major issues at all with
it.

Don't get me wrong, I am NOT implying that you are doing something
wrong, or anything like that.  I'm merely saying that while the
problems you are seeing are bad for you, a lot of others are not
seeing them at all, just as your experience thus far seems to be
completely different from mine.  It's just a matter of perspective,
which is why, when I say things like "well, it works fine here for me"
I try to make sure it's clear that I mean that it works here FOR ME,
and that may not hold true for someone else on different hardware,
with different stuff involved, and in a different use case.

> Since 10.04 is LTS, I will work hard to report any bugs at all. if there
> are any. Even though I have only written one bug, I do feel I have
> learned a lot about dealing with problems, just need more practice on
> the reporting.

Cool... just remember what I said, and welcome to the party ! :)  Bug
reports are always appreciated!

> On my use of the word disgusting, I feel that is an accurate term.
> Scrolling is unbelievably bad. It is pleasing to know it will work okay
> in just a few weeks.

I know, but it just smells of frustration more than anything else, and
I can certainly understand and empathise with your frustration.  I've
been a QA/Beta tester for almost 10 years now, which is the only
reason I'm so ... even tempered... about bugs, but OTOH, I do lose it
every now and then when one just completely pisses me off... heh...
those days, I have to just walk away for 30 minutes or so, calm down,
then come back and start investigating and reporting.

Good Luck!!

Cheers,

Jeff