Hi All:
I noticed Firefox crashing as well. The Firefox folks seem
to have
introduced a severe regression between Saturday and Sunday:
Firefox
crashes regardless of whether Orca is running or not. The
main crash in
Firefox that I'm experiencing is when I just happen to click
on a link.
If you revert back to Saturday's nightly, the problem goes
away:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2
007-03-10-04-trunk/firefox-3.0a3pre.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2
As an aside...
I've noticed people talking about the perceived instability
of Orca
itself, and I feel compelled to make a slight perception
adjustment.
Orca typically keeps running along when working with well
behaved
applications. The main barriers to accessibility are when
something
goes awry in the AT-SPI infrastructure or an application.
The two main
things that can go awry are either an application hanging or
an
application crashing.
Due to the implementation of the AT-SPI, if an application
hangs, it can
hang an assistive technology and/or the entire accessibility
infrastructure (and thus the desktop). Orca has some
defensive
mechanisms in it for hangs, but it cannot always detect all
hangs. As
such, when an application is behaving poorly, we sometimes
have the
paradoxical requirement of needing to restart Orca to
recover from poor
application behavior.
In my experiences, crashing applications are due to bugs in
the
application and/or toolkit that the application uses. That
is, when an
application crashes, I'm usually pretty confident that
there's not a bug
in Orca that caused the crash. Instead, it's typically a
legal AT-SPI
call from Orca that's causing a bug in the
application/toolkit/AT-SPI to
manifest itself in a catastrophic way. When faced with
these crashes,
however, we will do the following:
1) Track the problem down. Can we avoid tickling the bug in
the
application/toolkit/AT-SPI? If so, we try to implement
defensive and
avoidance strategies in Orca itself. A recent extreme
example includes
not looking at tooltips because examining tooltips through
legal AT-SPI
calls would cause the application to crash.
2) Whether we can work around the problem or not, we log a
bug with the
application, toolkit, and or AT-SPI infrastructure team. We
also pester
them to make sure they fix the problem. In the event that
they don't
fix the problem, we go into their code and fix it for them
and plead
with them to take our patch. This represents a considerable
time sink
for us, but someone has to do it.
From an end user standpoint, I realize a crash is a crash
and you don't
care. But, *I* care about the perception people have of
Orca itself.
We're a very hard working team and it hurts a little bit
when I see Orca
taking the blame for failures in other components. I do
have to remind
myself that's what happens when you are on top of the food
chain - you
get ill when your food sources become toxic.
The good thing is that maintainers of the application,
toolkit, and
AT-SPI infrastructure components really do care about
accessibility.
Moving forward, we're working step by step to encourage
component
maintainers to test their changes for accessibility
regressions before
committing them. This represents a cultural shift, and is
thus
something that will not happen overnight.
Will
(Orca Project Lead)
Lorenzo Taylor wrote:
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> I just installed the latest nightly build of FireFox
3.0. Imagine my
> surprise when I found out that Orca is now somehow
crashing FireFox.
> This is the FireFox dated March 10 and Orca from svn as
of a couple of
> days ago since nothing of consequence has been changed
since then other
> than the staroffice script and some translations. I
have only gotton 1
> page to display without crashing, and that page has no
links; it's just
> text, and only about 3 lines of text. Other pages
either crash
> immediately or wait until I move the flat review cursor
or press the tab
> or arrow keys. I blindly tried a google search without
Orca and when I
> started Orca again I found everything worked as
expected while Orca
> wasn't running. However, once I started Orca again and
found that the
> search results page had loaded, at least according to
the title and then
> pressed a flat review key, FireFox crashed and burned.
Is this a known
> issue at this time that is in the process of being
fixed in either
> FireFox or Orca in the near future? I was really
enjoying my new-found
> freedom to visit more sites using FireFox.
>
> Live long and prosper,
> Lorenzo
> - --
> I've always found anomalies to be very relaxing. It's a
curse.
> - --Jadzia Dax: Star Trek Deep Space Nine (The
Assignment)
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