03.09.07

Same Beta goodness, 80% less crashing

Posted in Camino at 5:15 pm by Smokey

Last weekend I noted we discovered that we had shipped Camino 1.1 Beta with a pretty serious random crasher. Thanks to some great detective work from Steven Michaud (author of the Java Embedding Plugin that ships in all Mozilla browsers) and some tooltip-wrangling by Stuart, we believe these crashes have been squashed. Talkback reports for nightly builds since the fix was checked in show crashes that may correspond to the one we fixed (Talkback lumps a number of things together, unfortunately) to have all but ceased.

Unfortunately, the branch nightly builds aren’t getting a lot of user testing right now. The lack of testing before 1.1 Beta was partly responsible for us shipping Beta with this crash, as we couldn’t tell until after the fact if the crash was widespread or just a few random incidents; there were too few Talkback reports to be significant. Now, on the flip side, we won’t be able to tell for sure if we’ve really fixed the crash unless we get significant numbers of users to move from 1.1 Beta to a nightly (and if the Talkback numbers remain low after that move).

If you are currently using 1.1 Beta and are sick of the random crashing, instead of suffering through or going back to Camino 1.0.4, please consider grabbing today’s branch nightly build and using it for a while instead of 1.1 Beta. This build has all the same features, some new bug fixes, and (hopefully) 80% fewer crashes. Your testing now will help ensure Camino 1.1 is as rock-solid as Camino 1.0 has been, and you will have the undying appreciation of the development and QA teams and hundreds of thousands of Camino users everywhere.

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