Last Firefox Update Was Because of Farmville
Mozilla rolls out Firefox update to remedy FarmVille issue.
Mozilla rolled a pretty big update for Firefox at the end of last week. However, the company rolled out another update right after. It was a teeny, tiny, update that fixed just one problem (adding an increase hang detector timeout) and it looks like the reason for the update was FarmVille.
Gamasutra reports that Mozilla rolled out v3.6.6 because the previous update was causing problems in the wildly popular social-networking game, FarmVille. Some FarmVille users were complaining that Firefox v3.6.4 "hangs the browser long enough for [a] timeout to trigger and kill it". It seems the issue stems from Firefox's new feature that terminates Flash if it is not responsive. However, because the likes of FarmVille and MafiaWars take longer to load, unnecessarily triggering this hang protection feature.
So, the latest version of Firefox has been updated to include an interim solution that increases the timeout, as developers look for a more ideal fix.
Mozilla's Justin Dolske posted the following on Bugzilla:
"… now that 3.6.4 has shipped, we are seeing an increasing number of reports that some users are unable to play Farmville, because Farmville hangs the browser long enough for out timeout to trigger and kill it. As an interm solution, we can increase the timeout and then look for a better solution. The SUMO article suggests that 30 seconds is a good value, so let's hit this with a big hammer and make it 45s."
Though FarmVille is mentioned specifically, a comment from Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox at Mozilla, revealed the problem wasn't isolated to FarmVille. That said, it appears the surge in complaints from FarmVille users is what finally pushed Mozilla to release a temporary solution.
- Firefox ,
- Mozilla ,
- FarmVille ,
- Mafia-Wars ,
- Zynga
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I lack a legitimate comment.
I lack a legitimate sympathy for the affected farmvillers
They don't expect any flash app to take more than 30 seconds to load? Newgrounds might as well close up shop.
Laugh Out Loud.
/facepalm, why not set the hang limit to 1 minute?
The only casual farming game worth playing is plants vs zombies anyway.
They don't expect any flash app to take more than 30 seconds to load? Newgrounds might as well close up shop.
Loading =/= Non-responsive
Ha! Ha! Haaaaa! Trust Farmville to screw up firefox!
What I don't understand is this simple fact - by the way, could Tom's investigate this ? - Why is this minor update called 3.66 instead of 3.65 ?
I've been to Mozilla's site and 3.6.5 does not exist at all. Why the jump from 3.6.4 to 3.6.6 ?
This news is way way late THG!
My virtual crops died along time ago ... Cows ran off .. Cyotes probably ate the fowl ... and that was pre 3.6 so ... Thanks for the news but anyday Farmville rules the browsers ... it has gone too far ..
I have had problems as of late with firefox not opening on my desktop. I have done all the updates and it still acts buggy..
I had a solution to Farmville crashing.
It involves a noose, a piece of paper, and a pen.
3.6.6 sucks, flash stuff crashes it like every other, and esp random ads that do that really sucks, im back to 3.6.3 though 3.7alpha looks good as far as mem and seems faster but still suffers exact same flash crashing as 3.6.6
also i believe the crashing is due to the new 10.1 flash, previous 10.0.x didnt crash almost never but it seems that its very difficult to get older flash versions to work
or even find
Ok, ever since the updates my flash player has gone horribly wrong on youtube. Here it explains something about 45s timeout whatever. When I go watch youtube vids the video is fine for exactly 45s then flash crashes. I cant watch any videos because of this update, It used to work just fine. Im gonna switch to Chrome for the time being until they release a fix that actually fixes the problem.
FU FARMVILLE!!!!!
It kept people from playing farmville, and they fixed this feature why? I thought they were out to help the world and kill off everyone's addiction to farmville
my farm js completely gone ******@yahoo.com
They've grown to a group that can influence broswer developers. That is scary.
both farmville and fishville cause me trouble now and then, esp. fishville. But I suspect it's a heat problem. My puter goes super hot after a few minutes of playing any of the Zynga games. About 20F on the cpu and about that or more on the mobo. I have a 120 mm fan, and normally my puter is cold as a rock, but them zynga games will make things heat up. Perhaps Tom's should investigate the matter.
MMORPG guys from my vent server " man why play a stupid game like that, farmville isn't even any fun, only way it would be fun if is you could grow pot, and had to kill stuff to keep it from wrecking or stealing your crops, and you had to hide everything from the cops, and feeding your pot crop to your animals turned them into zombies"
this was said to me by brits and some dutch guys at 5:30am (GMT i think?) their time while they are waiting to watch the Dutch vs. Brazil world cup football game stoned out of their gords.
C:\ Attempting to give a fuck...
C:\ |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 99% Complete...
C:\ Error! Unable to give a fuck
Just for the farmville, lol
I still say ban the resource hogging advertisement platform known as Flash.
They don't expect any flash app to take more than 30 seconds to load? Newgrounds might as well close up shop.
It's not loading time it's "hang time" when the flash app stops doing anything visible to the user. Most of the flash apps I've seen on Newgrounds don't go into zombie mode (not responding) for 30 seconds or longer in the way that Farmville does.
already using firefox 4.0 alpha and it kicks ass, sadly i cant test it with farmville cause i dont play it. but... farmville is pushing a firefox latest release? maybe we do need one or two bloated games. farmville might replace acid test 3
Seriously Farmville? Yeah I think it's great. In a World where half our population is dying of hunger the more fortunate half is spending their time harvesting food that doesn't exist.
Hahaha Mozilla had to provide a fix to patch Zynga's shitty servers.
They don't expect any flash app to take more than 30 seconds to load? Newgrounds might as well close up shop.
As Pyroflea said, loading is not hanging. Hanging means nothing is responding at all.
When flash is loading, it actually has algorithms running to calculate bytes loaded and the max bytes of the flash application. This is what users will use to make loading bars. Therefore, when flash is loading something, it is actually making a response.
When a flash app hangs, it is just like a Windows blue screen. The app is frozen, and not sending any responses. Firefox having the kill switch is a good thing because you don't risk crashing the entire browser because a flash app went into a hang cycle.