Hacker's ramblings

On version 43 Firefox announced: Firefox 64-bit for Windows Available.

Whoa! Already? I've been waiting for that to happen since 2005 when Fedora Core 4 was released. It had a 64-bit Firefox in it. Actually Fedora Core 3 had one, but it was a beta version and I didn't use it ever. So my 11 year wait is over.

Mozilla's release policy is ... how to put it ... confusing? Insane? Mindless? Linux and OS X had proper versions of my favorite browser years ago, but on Windows, they seriously dopped the ball. Competition have had 64-bit builds for: Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome, Dillo and what not. Even the mostly malfunctioning slow piece of crap Edge has a 64-bit build of it.

Back in 2011 there was a decent version of 64-bit Firefox 8 in the works. See article Firefox 8 for Windows x64: Has 64-bit browsing finally come of age? about that. Then came 2012 and at end of that year something happened: Mozilla quietly kills Firefox 64-bit for Windows, despite an estimated 50% of testers using it. 

Here is the 2012 Mozilla’s manager list of bullshit reasons for not doing a 64-bit version:

• Many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions.
• The plugins that are available don’t work correctly in Firefox because we haven’t implemented things like windowproc hooking, which means that hangs are more common.
• Crashes submitted by 64-bit users are currently not high priority because we are working on other things.
• This is frustrating for users because they feel (and are!) second-class.
• It is also frustrating for stability team triage because crash-stats does not easily distinguish between 32-bit and 64-bit builds in the topcrash lists and other reports. We basically ignore a set of nightly “topcrashes” because they are 64-bit only. (See bug 811051).

I'd still like to point out that at that time Linux and OS X had it. The list is total bullshit, as the crash reports and triage would have easily identified build bitness with minor changes, if only there would have been a true will of doing it. Most of people like me didn't care about lacking plugin support. Everything that I needed was already there and working.

Since there were a lot of comments about not doing the 64-bit Windows version, there was some flip-flopping about the decision: Mozilla backpedals on Firefox 64-bit for Windows, will keep nightly builds coming after all.

There were couple of silent years, then the project had a come-back. On 2014: Mozilla is making plans for 64-bit Firefox browser. As the decision was in to go for 64-bit, the only thing missing was developer resources. Obviously Mozilla was busy developing features, not the 64-bit build. Hower, last summer there was news: Mozilla delays 64-bit Firefox for Windows again. And finally, couple of releases later they had the official stable version out.

The obvious effect will be for Cyberfox. 8pecxstudios has been very active in the 64-bit scene and I've been using their excellent product for couple of years. My previous favorite, Waterfox advertises being a high performance browser based on the Mozilla platform made specifically for 64-Bit systems. They say that Waterfox has one thing in mind: speed, however, it's in a very low maintenance mode and currently it is 3 versions behind. In my book, that's unmaintained already.

I strongly doubt that none of the excuse-list items have vaporized. I'm glad that the version is out, but not very happy that it took so many years. This entire case is a disgrace.

Software developers are stupid morons!

I have worked as one for couple of decades, so take my word for it. I know quite a few of them. Stupid morons, software developers and people who are both.

The reason for my rant is this JavaScript bugger:

var t = /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i;

It keeps popping up constantly. For people not familiar with regular expressions, that is a piece of code to match a valid e-mail address as specified by the one and only, original specification for ARPA Internet Text Messages, which we call e-mail today. As I keep insisting, software developers have major deficit both on writing proper code and testing their writtern code. For non-software developers: the reason that ill written line of code has spread around the internet like autumn flu, is that people just google for the regexp and copy/paste it into their product without thinking it for a second. It worked last time, right?

Here are the facts:
This is the list of IANA approved top-level-domains: http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt in plain-text format. The list contains 1115 domains at the time of this vent. 570 of them are longer than 4 chars as limited by the above piece of crap. That results only 49% of valid TLDs being approved as valid ones. Anybody doing his/hers work only by 49% of success should be fired! Instantly.

Examples of valid TLDs:
As an example, the IANA list contains following domains: .cancerresearch, .xn--t60b56a, .international and .xn--vermgensberatung-pwb. The ones having lettersn XN, are internationalized domain names or IDNs. When decoded, .xn--c2br7g equals to नेट, .xn--t60b56a equals to 닷넷, both meaning .net in Hindi and Korean. Another ones are .xn--mgba3a3ejt for ارامكو, Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company and .xn--vermgensberatung-pwb for .vermögensberatung, German for financial advice. All of them are fully valid, but not being validated by the ancient piece of copy/paste mess everybody seems to be using.

Some of the weaker players:
The idiot-of-the-year -award doesn't go to http://www.moonfruit.com/ or http://tunnus.yle.fi/ who are strong competitors using that relic of a validator. The obvious winner is https://www.startssl.com/, who have a hard-coded list of 2827 domains and subdomains, having only 464 of the TLDs in the IANA-list. 651 of them missing, matching only 42% of the valid ones. Idiots!

If you are a software developer and reading this: It's time to shape up! Stop doing your job poorly.