OSX + Minefield + WebGL + Points = :(
Andor Salga | 14 November, 2009 | 18:11
A while ago, Cathy found that Firefox crashes if you try rendering point primitives using Canvas 3D while running DVD Player on OSX. A bit of a strange bug, but I guess most bugs are. At that time, I wrote a blog post which mentions the issue and I filed a bug in Bugzilla. That was half a year ago. Interestingly enough, this week someone changed the status of the bug to critical. I checked it out and the bug is still sitting there unconfirmed. This makes me sad and I want to change that.
With WebGL now part of Minefield, I wanted to see if the bug is still present. I opened one of our mocap demos and I was reminded why I hate testing for this bug. The process is nothing short of extremely frustrating. Why? Because as soon as I select a scene to play in the DVD player application, the entire OS freaks out. My cursor turns into a happy spinning candy thing while the OS response time slows to an insufferable crawl. I’m left waiting there for the Force Quit dialog to appear so I can quit Minefield or the DVD player. I often found myself following the three finger salute with its base class.
Anyway, this means that whatever was screwy with Canvas 3D slipped into Mozilla’s implementation of WebGL in Minefield. I believe I can rule out the DVD Player being the cause because I think it plays nice when rendering other content. I say think because I don’t have the patience to keep playing with it and narrowing the problem down, it’s that bad. But what I do know is it’s crashing at least when rendering points.
I know, the problem is very specific. You need to run Minefield in OSX while playing a DVD while rendering point primitives. This is probably why my bug is still unconfirmed . I’m still adamant that this needs to be fixed. Sure, our library has a workaround, we render small spheres by default instead of WebGL’s point primitives. But what if we find the bug cropping up in other places? I need to update the bug in Bugzilla to try to prevent this. If the problem is now a Minefield issue instead of an extension issue, the chances of it getting fixed with be increased. If not, the problem will eventually become a Firefox issue. What worries me about that is sometimes Firefox issues take a while to get resolved.
With WebGL now part of Minefield, I wanted to see if the bug is still present. I opened one of our mocap demos and I was reminded why I hate testing for this bug. The process is nothing short of extremely frustrating. Why? Because as soon as I select a scene to play in the DVD player application, the entire OS freaks out. My cursor turns into a happy spinning candy thing while the OS response time slows to an insufferable crawl. I’m left waiting there for the Force Quit dialog to appear so I can quit Minefield or the DVD player. I often found myself following the three finger salute with its base class.
Anyway, this means that whatever was screwy with Canvas 3D slipped into Mozilla’s implementation of WebGL in Minefield. I believe I can rule out the DVD Player being the cause because I think it plays nice when rendering other content. I say think because I don’t have the patience to keep playing with it and narrowing the problem down, it’s that bad. But what I do know is it’s crashing at least when rendering points.
I know, the problem is very specific. You need to run Minefield in OSX while playing a DVD while rendering point primitives. This is probably why my bug is still unconfirmed . I’m still adamant that this needs to be fixed. Sure, our library has a workaround, we render small spheres by default instead of WebGL’s point primitives. But what if we find the bug cropping up in other places? I need to update the bug in Bugzilla to try to prevent this. If the problem is now a Minefield issue instead of an extension issue, the chances of it getting fixed with be increased. If not, the problem will eventually become a Firefox issue. What worries me about that is sometimes Firefox issues take a while to get resolved.
