May 16, 2011

Are bugs too crude?

I use a OS X quite a bit. I also like to maximise, or zoom, my browser window. Happily, it’s possible to bind the zoom command to a hot key in OS X which adds the zoom command to the window menu along with your chosen hot key, Ctrl F12 in my case. This arrangement works well for almost every application I use on a regular basis apart from Firefox and Chrome. Chrome seems to have its own ideas about what zoom means, mainly maintaining a page like aspect ratio, but Firefox behaves oddly. When initially opened Firefox won’t zoom unless you use the + button on the window border. It will start responding correctly if you open the window menu then reselect the window you want to control. It seem like Firefox doesn’t notice the modifications until it is asked to draw the window menu. This looks very much like a bug in Firefox as Firefox does not behave as expected. However it’s a minor bug and, while it certainly annoys me, it’s unlikely to affect may users and certainly not in any real negative manner. I could file a bug but it would soak up developer time simply by needing to be triaged. A few seconds of my time every so often versus a few minutes of developer time is a bad trade-off in my mind. It’d be nice to be able to record this somewhere without soaking up developer time that could be better spent on the, currently, 2511 open OS X bugs.