945384 - Popcorn crashes, and then lies :-(

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 924398

(Webmaker Graveyard :: Popcorn Maker, defect)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Several of my students told me, when trying to do homework two weeks ago, that "Popcorn crashed". "You mean your web browser crashed? Websites don't crash", I said. But they insisted.

Today, I saw this dialogue for the first time. It says something like "Popcorn has died and needs to reload. Your work will be saved." 

But it lies! The student's work (OK, not much) was not saved when the page reloaded.

Having the concept of a 'crash' in a website seems an unwanted innovation - if only because it deeply confuses teachers. And it leaves both teacher and student feeling as helpless as a normal application crash does. Crashes are for languages where you can accidentally jump the instruction pointer to NULL and have no way to continue. JS is not such a language.

But if you are going that way, then it needs to actually do what it promises, and restore the user's work.

I'd love to give you STRs, but I can't. I think she was dragging an image around the canvas at the time.

Gerv

Comment 1

[Matthew Schranz [:mjschranz]]

Sadly that box was implemented around the time we wanted to have proper auto backup's done and it was a feature that didn't make it to the original 1.0. We are going to be bringing it back into the fold soon enough making that dialog text fairly warranted.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=924398 for it's progress.

Thanks for all of your work Gerv!