22-year-old bug in Firefox fixed! So, what was the bug?

A bug that has existed for 22 years in Mozilla Firefox, the world's fourth most popular browser, has finally been fixed.

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22-year-old bug in Firefox fixed! So, what was the bug?

The world's most used browsers sometimes have bugs and security vulnerabilities. Developers or engineers who notice issues that companies have missed can report the problem to the company or solve it themselves and submit the fix. According to a report by Ars Technica, a problem that had been in Firefox for years was resolved at the end of September.

THE MOZILLA BUG SOLVED AFTER 22 YEARS

The issue caused a tooltip displaying a link on a pinned tab to remain visible even if the browser was minimized or obscured by other programs.

If you have pinned tabs in your browser and hover over one of them, a small tooltip appears showing the full name of the pinned site and a link to it. If you did not move the cursor away from that tab and, for example, minimized the browser using Alt+Tab on Windows, the tooltip containing the link would remain on the screen.

A bug report regarding this issue was added to the Mozilla forums 22 years ago. Over the years, this forum page, which collected user feedback, remained inconclusive, and the problem was not solved or could not be solved.

Because the bug did not affect the browser's performance, it was classified as 'cosmetic' and therefore remained unresolved. However, Yifan Zhu, a developer who found the issue annoying, decided to fix it. When he began his research, he saw that the problem had remained unsolved or unaddressed for 22 years.

Zhu created a patch that causes the tooltip to disappear not when you move the cursor, but when Firefox ceases to be the active window. Zhu then shared the patch he developed with Mozilla developers, effectively fixing a legendary bug.

News Source: 12punto