Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie wondered if the beta testers hadn’t been testing the limits.

You want to know what convinced Mozilla to issue an update so quickly?

Farmville.

Apparently Firefox was detecting Farmville as frozen and closing it. It turns out that on many computers, Farmville regularly freezes up the browser for longer than 10 seconds, and its players just deal with it and wait for it to come back. Mozilla decided that the simplest thing to do would be to increase the time limit.

What this tells me is that the type of person willing to beta-test a web browser these days is not likely to be playing Farmville — or if they are, it’s likely to be on a bleeding-edge computer that can handle it without 10-second freezes.

In more practical terms: Mozilla needs to convince a wider variety of users to help test their software!

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

• What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
• Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
• Does it look like..
  1. The desktop version of the site (photo banner across top, full sidebar, complete posts on front page)
  2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by WordPress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
  3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, headlines on main page that expand to excerpts, dark banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
• Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
• Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

• Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
• Send me a Twitter direct message to @KelsonV.
• Email me at kelson - [at] - pobox - [dot] - com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

One thing I haven’t figured out yet: since the list is separated by spaces, how do you specify a multi-word tag like “Internet Explorer”?

To be honest, this post only exists because I want to test it, and because there seems to be a tradition of “I just installed this neat new plugin” posts.

Update: multi+word doesn’t seem to work. (It was a guess based on URL encoding.) Technorati has picked this post up on “testing” but not “multi word.” Next attempt: double%20word (in case the first one was just slow)—but since I’m not sure whether Technorati will re-index this post until I add a new one, it may not be a useful test just yet.

Update 2: Two things: In the URL, WP encodes the % in %20. Figures. Also, that wouldn’t show up as a space in normal HTML. I am clearly sleep-deprived and must immediately begin a period of nocturnal inactivity for at least eight hours. Either that or down a glass or two of Dr. Pepper.

Having just glanced at the code, which I should have done in the first place, there does not appear to be any allowance for multi-word tags (it just uses the standard explode function). This leaves me with several choices:

1. Enable the option to use comma-separated keywords (losing the utility of the convenient form field)—and re-enable it every time I upgrade the plugin.
2. Contact the plug-in author and request the feature.
3. Hack the plug-in to enable it and submit the changes to the author.
4. Use a plug-in that takes another approach, like TechnoTag.

#3 sounds like my best bet, but I think I ought to sleep first.