Fixed Template modifications. Firefox issue.

Shelley

Well-known member
Probably not a xenforo bug but rather a browser bug but I'll report it anyway so your aware of it.

I tried pasting in full template code when creating a template modification and it wasnt spaced out and structured properly in the latest firefox version so the template change didn't work. I had to go into chrome to paste the code in to get it working.

Just alerting you of it and it's probably a browser issue or maybe an isolated issue.
 
How do you track all these tiny fixes so that if the browser bug (or other 3rd party software bug) is eventually fixed you'll know to come back and clean up the XenForo code and revert it to the way it 'should' have been if the browser bug wasn't present?

Do you have a list of these somewhere that you revisit every few months to see if it's still required?

I can imagine it's very easy to forget why you may have made a small adjustment like this to fix a 12 year old browser. If further down the line though this is rectified, there's a still the chance your fix could possibly have a negative knock on effect elsewhere so you'd want to remove it, or 'unfix' it, right? (Maybe not in this particular case, but with these kind of workaround fixes in general)
 
There is no reason why this work around fix is 'invalid' and will continue to work post-release of a fix within the browser.
 
I'm not speaking just with regards to this fix in particular, but small fixes in general. It could be a redactor fix, or a PHP workaround due to version incompatibility. If a year or two down the line say a few hundred or a couple of thousand small fixes are applied then there's probably a fair bit of code added or edited just for small workarounds or fixes.

Partly the interest of keeping the codebase clean and lean and partly due to the off chance they could have an inadvertent negative knock on impact elsewhere, would it not make sense to remove some of these once they're no longer required? If this is the case I was curious as to whether there was a particular type system in place to revisit these fixes and cull the ones no longer necessary once they become obsolete?
 
I'm not speaking just with regards to this fix in particular, but small fixes in general. It could be a redactor fix, or a PHP workaround due to version incompatibility. If a year or two down the line say a few hundred or a couple of thousand small fixes are applied then there's probably a fair bit of code added or edited just for small workarounds or fixes.

Partly the interest of keeping the codebase clean and lean and partly due to the off chance they could have an inadvertent negative knock on impact elsewhere, would it not make sense to remove some of these once they're no longer required? If this is the case I was curious as to whether there was a particular type system in place to revisit these fixes and cull the ones no longer necessary once they become obsolete?

I wouldn't see why not if a fix made became obsolete that it wouldn't be removed, chances are it would be removed looking back at how things are done. Take for example the spritesheet, images became obsolete when 1.2 came and therefore they were removed.
 
You also have to take into account what browsers and versions you support. My parents still use a version of Chrome that is 3 years old, so if you start removing some of these little fixes, you begin to reintroduce issues for bugs. The code base is clean and performance is always a priority for Kier & Mike when developing. These 'little fixes' shouldn't cause issues.
 
Good point, even if it were to be fixed in in the next version of FF it wouldn't be removed for a long time to maintain backward compatibility with users still running the old version.

I guess where my initial thought came from was the scenario where a another bug/issue may arise due to an old workaround and it gets traced back to a small fix that had been implemented a long time ago and the dev might wonder why it had been implemented if it's due to some ancient 12 year old FF bug, but I guess a comment with the bug report number would cover that.

The only other scenario I thought about was when support is dropped for an old browser or old version of a 3rd party piece of software integrated into XF. If for example if IE8 support is dropped in a few years then all IE8 related fixes could be removed easily found and removed if there was a log of them.

As you say though, these little fixes shouldn't really cause issues anyway. It just surprised me that this particular fix related to such an old bug and it got me thinking about how you would handle lots of issues like that in a large piece of software and not forget about them if they were patched in the future.
 
I dunno what it is with the latest version of firefox but I am getting some quirky adverse issues pasting anything with cursors not appearing or unable to select a location on a message (when editing) to paste in info. Is anyone else having this issue from time to time with firefox 25.0.1
 
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