miscoded

Cheer up Hallvord, the bugs will get worked out. Go outside and enjoy the outdoors. It is good to get away from computers now and again. I for one am glad for the improved JavaScript and CSS support. Although I really wish that some of the features removed in the UI could be reenabled...

Anyway some sites do not work when Opera 9.50 is released. Be happy that you were not a member of the IE7 team .

I like Opera 9.5 very very much. It's more stable than ever before, fast and reliable. New releases always bring up new problems, so don't worry too much. This version of Opera is by far the best ever released so far. The whole team did a fine job.

releasing something is the most depressing job for somebody doing quality assurance

After working in QA for many years, i would have to disagree. I was always proud of the work I had done and the quality of the product that I was testing and putting my stamp on. I think the internal structure of the company may be the issue here.

In the places I've worked, things aren't released into final/stable until QA has "signed off" on it. It means they are comfortable with the bugs that are left and they have ran all the regression testing and whatever testing they need. Although the whole process is timeline-driven, QA is virtually the final say on whether something makes it into the end users hands. That's how it has been in my QA experiences. Quality Assurance tells the higher-ups that the build is ready to go public.

I know that every time I release a X.0 of something, inevitably there will be a X.1 following very soon afterwards! It's just the way things go.

This time, part of it has to be the fact that it's been so long since the previous official release of Opera, which has allowed plenty of time for stacks of new features and bug fixes to go in. And new bugs! People don't notice all the new stuff that works, but boy do they notice all the things that go wrong! A more frequent release schedule with fewer things going wrong at each step might be better?

Edit: Ooops, hit send too soon. I did, of course, want to congratulate the entire Opera dev and QA teams for all the work they've put into this release. I've considered for a while now that a modern web browser must be one of the most complicated pieces of software around, and the thought of working on one scares me silly!

Originally posted by Andrew Gregory:

A more frequent release schedule with fewer things going wrong at each step might be better

A very good idea indeed. We moved to this paradigm as not to bury QA in stacks of things to test. Smaller releases make a smaller surface area for QA to check. Not a bad idea at all.

d.i.z on the forums has pointed out that the tinymce patch is currently looking for exactly a minor version of zero when the major version is 3. That should be changed to looking for a minor version starting with zero, hmmmm? Drop the second single quote?:

e.element.text.match(/minorVersion:'0/)

Originally posted by hallvors:

Perhaps your software did not have to render several billion web pages though?

It most certainly did not. Keep in mind that we didn't release bug-free software. one major sore spot for me with this release is that Opera is announcing Dragonfly to the world for public consumption... oh yea, and its the source of a crasher. That was quite unfortunate. I understand releasing with crashers but it seems bad form for them to be linked to your most celebrated features. Just my opinion.

Originally posted by hallvors:

That the new version is a great improvement over the old is the most important reason for releasing it.

This was true 6 months ago as well. 9.5 brought a lot improvements over 9.27. I agree 100%. Kestrel didn't just not get way better than Merlin.

Please understand that I am not attempting to put down the quality of the desktop team and other staff. On the contrary, I would like you (us) to succeed but it disappoints me when things like this release happen. This release is not something I can put in front of people to wow them which is what I wanted. I hate being embarrassed of/by something that I love.

Originally posted by hallvors:

at some point the advantages of getting 9.5 out to the masses will outweigh the known bugs and the regressions we might introduce by fixing them might be worse than the issues we have

Could you or someone talk about why Opera is so regression-prone? I use lots of unstable/beta/nightly-build software but none of it as chaotic/volatile as Opera in its cycle. From one week to the next, almost anything can be broken. And seemingly, people don't have to work on it for it to be fixed and the broken thing does not have to be related. Like a mail fix and break some javascript functionality. I have a theory that too many people are checking in to one branch. I'm pretty sure you can't talk about this but I'll continue on my tangent. I know kestrel is on a branch but I would assume that other branch off for fixes so you can decide when code changes go in. So while someone is fixing mail they don't stomp someone elses javascript fix that is not the focus for the release. I'm talking about the stable-trunk/always-branch development policy. So every fix and every feature would live in its own branch (not literally 1 branch per fix but basically not making fixes on trunk). This allows you to decide precisely when a fix goes in as well as keep trunk as stable as possible. So only when fixes are fully tested do they go back to trunk. Just my two cents...

TinyMCE will re-arrange your sentences in somewhat unpredictable ways when you press enter

I experienced that on odnoklassniki.ru (Russian most popular site for classmates).
I hope they will manage to upgrade to newest version of TinyMCE or it needs UserJS path from Opera.

Originally posted by hallvors:

I generally disagree that we have so many apparently random regressions (but then I may have a somewhat clearer view of what is being worked on and what is going in so maybe I'm biased)

Must be nice to be you. From the folks outside, it is completely random. Until the dev process becomes less closed, i assume it will remain just as random to us (outsiders).

BTW, the worst regressions are regressions in UI. Those can't be fixed with UserJS magic...

Go back at some of the builds and look at the guaranteed incomplete changelog and then look at the known issues list... when the issues are added (not merely remaining from the previous release).

Here's a recent example:
Build before:

Known issues:
Dragonfly does not work when JavaScript is disabled.

Chaos ensues:

Known issues:
Dragonfly does not work when JavaScript is disabled.
All the search icons are Opera icons
Translate menu doesn't work
Panel dropdown selector doesn't work

Changelog:
Fixed links in the fraud protection dialog
Fixed crash when saving mhtml files
Fixed random crasher when going back in history
Fixed moving videos on youtube when hovering tabs
Made form submit work properly in widgets
Fixed bug where plugins would continue streaming after closing a tab
XHR - Fixed calling of calling abort() from readyState 2 or 3
More fixes to xpath
Fixed viewing of feeds with slow loading images
Fixed problem with duplication of bookmarks when using Opera Link
Fixed issue where the integrated Dragonfly window would be too tall
Added three default speed dial entries
Windows: Fixed the default Save and Open dialog folders
UNIX: Fixed import of mail on when using the QT filechooser
UNIX: Improved finding of icons for download dialog
UNIX: Fixed filename when saving URL's

Notice how the changes seemingly have no relation to what got broken. This ofcourse excludes "Dragonfly does not work when JavaScript is disabled" since this was left over from the week before. This is a very common occurence. Seemingly untouched code (based on incomplete changelog) is broken. I'm sure if we had more information it would seem less random but I don't see that changing in the immediate future. It's always "how'd they break A when they were fixing X, Y, and Z?" to us outsiders.

Also, I don't think and didn't mean to suggest that your job is easy.

Surely the wide variety of issues and fixes is related to certainty that there is a wide variety of modules and developers all under way at the same time?

Originally posted by Andrew Gregory:

Surely the wide variety of issues and fixes is related to certainty that there is a wide variety of modules and developers all under way at the same time

I'm quite aware that the development is not as narrow as the small portion the desktop team makes public. However, should all those changes be in trunk at the same time? The DTT has obviously answered yes but on this we disagree. Moving from the volatile trunk policy would curb regressions but may have some other pitfalls I'm not aware of.

@Hallvors: What are some benefits of the current source policy? If you can answer that, I'd like you to answer from your professional QA position as well as how it benefits me, the external end user.

Originally posted by hallvors:

I guess what you are saying is that "ongoing work" should be listed in the weekly changelogs, not just "bug fixes", IMO a good point that the Desktop team should consider.

Exactomundo! Perhaps you could nudge some people on the desktop team?

I see your point though. Looking back at the older changelogs most of the regressions are not core stuff.

I wander if TMCE relies on established, published standards (such as e.g. W3C Range)?

or it demands every browser on the planet to mimick either MSHTML desingMode ("no public standard that applies to this property"), or Mozilla Midas/Gecko DOM (with its "Not part of specification").

Opera doesn't follow every standard either. That is one of my major repeated complaints. Opera is known to be "the standards nazi". However, on its page of supported standards very few are in complete accordance. Almost all of them have exceptions to the rules. It is generall 1-2 of 30-50. It is unfortunate that Opera doesn't completely support more of the standards. Also opera has proprietary stuff as well like -o-* css stuff. All browsers have proprietary things... some just more than others... and some more useful than others. Check out safari's proprietary css goodness:

• css reflections
• css gradients
• css image masks

It's not all bad. Just different.</partially_unrelated_rant>

TinyMCE (like all javascript) relies on standards when they are available but falls back to conventions and proprietary mechanisms as needed.

Opera doesn't follow every standard either. That is one of my major repeated complaints. Opera is known to be "the standards nazi". However, on its page of supported standards very few are in complete accordance. Almost all of them have exceptions to the rules. It is generall 1-2 of 30-50. It is unfortunate that Opera doesn't completely support more of the standards. Also opera has proprietary stuff as well like -o-* css stuff. All browsers have proprietary things... some just more than others... and some more useful than others. Check out safari's proprietary css goodness:

• css reflections
• css gradients
• css image masks

It's not all bad. Just different.</partially_unrelated_rant>

TinyMCE (like all javascript) relies on standards when they are available but falls back to conventions and proprietary mechanisms as needed.

Originally posted by Moxiecode Systems:

Here are a few pointers for you.

1) Make your own test editor (Like the Midas demo that Mozilla has).
2) Write up some documentation on what is actually implemented.
3) Look at the WHATWG papers for guidelines.
4) When all else fails do it like Mozilla/Firefox.

This post is also interesting (although being outdated by now):
http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2006/11/17/being-compatible-with-the-dark-matter-of

my basic rant is:
* textarea was designed just to fill multi-line forms (like address and such);
* HTTP POST was designed to send just small portions of text, filled in those forms said;
* unless there's no well-defined (and implemented in the browsers core) standards on RTE, Flash (and yes, Java was) may be the way to go;
* DOM/JS is a cool thing. but prototype.js/*.aculo.us (and alike) and sites like last.fm (just an example) is the awful, hardly bearable resource hogs;

* and finally, to make my rant-list short:

A browser ain't a platform (never meant to be)!

(I just want fast threaded comments ;-)