A problem which was fairly rare in the past seems to be happening more frequently lately, both to me and to other players. To give you an idea, I've had probably four or five reports of this problem in the past month or two, and about that many in the preceding year. I suspect it's happening more often than that, though.
The problem is this: Sometimes when you're using the Java games here at Pocket-Monkey, your web browser crashes. This happens to me with the latest Firefox for Windows and the latest Sun Java plug-in; it also happened to me with the previous version of both, but less frequently. But it doesn't appear to be specific to Firefox; users with Internet Explorer also run into the problem.
For me, one of two things happens: Either Firefox just completely disappears, or it "hangs" -- e.g., it goes non-responsive. Some users have reported that they actually get an error message relating to their display driver, and another found a Java error log which also indicated it was a problem related to displaying the game board. As far as I can tell, it isn't specific to certain games or types of games, it happens seemingly at random.
This is awkward, because technically, our code shouldn't be able to crash your browser; if it can, that's a bug in the Java plug-in or something that it relies on (like the display driver). This is one of the reasons Java applets are useful on the web; they run in a "sandbox" which is supposed to protect your computer from things like this.
That said, though, I assume this can't be a widespread problem or Sun would have fixed the plug-in by now. So once the update we're currently testing goes live, we're going to do a thorough review of our Java applet code in the area where it seems to trigger this bug in the plug-in, in hopes that we can do things slightly differently to avoid triggering this bug.
In the meantime, one thing that seems to help is to be sure to wait after clicking Send until the turn result is shown before clicking to move somewhere else in the site -- my bad habit is sending my turn, then immediately clicking the "Next Game >>" link while the turn is still being sent to the server, which means that the applet is still talking to the server when I switch away from it. If you don't do that, it seems to minimize the chances of this problem occurring. (Which is good, because it gives us something to look at in the code!)
I have also had this happen (Win XP/Firefox 1.5.0.1/Java 1.5.0).
It used to happen rarely (several weeks apart) and still does on here but on the test site it has been happening more frequently, completely closing Firefox without any warning or 'not-responding' messages etc.
It has happened with various different games and also with tourney games. It has also happened when loading the first game (so it seems to not just be when sending a turn and clicking next game). After crashing and restarting Firefox I have never had it crash again during the new session, and usually not for a while after.
Thanks. Weird, isn't it? That's about what it's like for me, although for me it's about even between here and the test site. I have had it crash when opening games, but not nearly so often as when moving to the next one.
It's been in at least three versions of the plug-in (including 1.4), so I've lost hope that they'll fix the bug. :-) And as you say, it seems to be getting worse. So here's hoping my review of the Pocket-Monkey code reveals something we can change to get around it.
-- T.J. :-)
Re: Re: Re: Crashing Browsers with Java Games
Message #1842 Replies: 0
posted by pint of beer (john shields) on 03/09 at 09:49
hey TJ that has happened to me a few times a day i must admit it is because i like you click next game while the move is being sent. i usually have to click on either the beta site or the main site when it happens as whick ever site gives me the error message also throws me of that site. so i have to rejoin the site.
An update on this: I said above that we'd be reviewing our Java applet code to see if we could find anything in it which we could change in hopes of not triggering the bug in the plug-in. (Again, the bug is in the plug-in, but we could try to work around it.) We're tackling this (in a somewhat different way) as part of the infrastructure work described in this thread.
In the meantime, I would recommend using the latest Firefox 2.0 from the Mozilla Foundation (http://www.mozilla.org/firefox). I've been using the test versions of this for months now, and it's a great browser. One of its excellent features is that if your browser crashes, when you restart it it offers to restore all of your open tabs and such exactly as they were. It makes it a lot less painful when Java crashes your browser. Firefox is also a truly excellent (and free) browser with no adware or spyware. Now that Version 2 is officially released, I strongly recommend it to all of our players.
That sounds like something to bring up with your ISP; Pocket-Monkey is here and running correctly 24 hours/day almost every day of the week (typically Sunday mornings -- UK time -- I take it down for 30-45 minutes for backups and such). -- T.J. Crowder First Primate Pocket-Monkey.com
Re: Crashing Browsers with Java Games
Message #5968 Replies: 1
posted by Lindap957 (Linda G. Parker) on 02/09 at 05:13
There is now a new update for the Java. J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 update 11 is now available. I got the update at 12 am on Feb. 09, 2007. Just thought I would inform other of the new update.
Re: Crashing Browsers with Java Games
Message #5969 Replies: 1
posted by Lindap957 (Linda G. Parker) on 02/09 at 06:13
In reply to the post above I found the website to download the update which is ll. It is found at the following web address:
No, Adobe hasn't bought Sun; they're still independent.
-- T.J. :-)
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