On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 09:06:22AM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: > This started on firefox a few weeks ago. Many Web sites have a link with a > mailing address on a page. When the cursor hovers on the link the firefox > status line shows 'mailto...'. That's OK. But, if I click on the link > associated with that mailto address the display is locked and not responsive > to mouse droppings. The only response is to ctrl-alt-backspace which kills > Xfce4 so I must again run starx to invoke the GUI.
I don't click "mailtos", instead I cut and paste the addresses into ssh/xterm window running Mutt on another machine. Emailing from browsers seems like an exploit waiting to happen. So, I don't encounter the problem Rich has, but I see quite a few others. One of my annoyances is that a combination of Google Maps, Firefox, a 2048x1536 screen, and who knows how many other quirky dependencies causes my desktop to crash to the login screen at random times. I must always remember to save everything else in all the virtuals (a file being text-edited, for example) before I use Google Maps. Or use something besides Google Maps or Firefox. While I'm sure the pathology could be debugged with some effort, the question is *WHY* my desktop (gnome 2 or mate) is even /capable/ of crashing (or in Rich's case, freezing XFCE) in response to /anything/ an application can do. This seems like Very Bad Design, poor encapsulation, whatever. Firefox - somehow - has toxic hooks into the desktop environment. How could /anything/ Firefox emits change the run state of the desktop? Why would the desktop respond to /any/ application (not just firefox) with a freeze or a crash? Don't the APIs(?) have filters and bounds checks? As I continue my search for a low-animation desktop that /Does ONLY What I Tell It To With Clicks/ and /Does Not Permit Pathologies/, I will gather stories like this. Sometimes, it seems like GUI programmers are intentionally malign, adding features that behave like a keyboard that eats hands. If badly-written, non-regression-tested software can have such results, what can malign software do? As a chip designer, I feel some responsibility. Processors should have parallel processes that do bounds checks and byte counting. Moving chunks of data should be atomic operations at the hardware level, with process-tied semaphores and flags. Yes, during software development, programmers would be pestered with hardware that barfs when they make mistakes, but that is better than /me/ barfing when their mistakes get shipped. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
