Rare errors. In particular, for Abrowser 88.0 (32-bits)

Physicians are acquainted with rare illnesses, illnesses that happen to so few patients that there is no chance to study them properly and are unlikely to get a cure.

Analogously, people in computing find errors that are so scarce that they are unlikely to get properly debugged. I have no expectations on some of these to get ever fixed - but then, at least, it is well worth to write a report about some of these, for the sake of anybody in the future searching information about them, or, alternatively, you can just call it a rant.

When you use a particularly slow computer, you notice errors invisible to others. I remember nearly twenty years ago, testing a friend's website and finding errors that he claimed were impossible to happen. Two-level pull-down javascript menus, deploying slowly, allowed for clicking on them whilst half-deployed - and this would cause an error. For the most people, this error would be impossible to reproduce because of the pull-down menus deploying so quickly there would be no chance to click on them whilst half-deployed.

Now, there are two ways to get a particularly slow computer. The obvious one is getting an old, unpowerful computer. The alternative one is to have an unresponsive network - any computer, no matter how powerful, is brought to its knees when experiencing network delays.

Now I am focusing on Abrowser 88.0 (32-bits) on one of these computers. The frequent combination of keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+R, Ctrl+Tab (reload the current tab for whatever the reason, move to the next tab which is already loaded) will result on being performed the other way round - Abrowser will switch to the next tab, then reload it.

But the biggest annoyance is the lazyness in the loading process. Sometimes, when the network malfunctions, Abrowser will not even acknowledge that the address was introduced. The address is left in the address bar, as if you typed it but never hit Enter. The same happens even if the address comes from clicking on a bookmark, or on the browser history. Any time you choose to open in tabs all bookmarks from a bookmark folder with more that a dozen bookmarks, you are likely to find some of these lazy tabs that put the address in the address bar but do no further work than that. It can happen too if you choose to quickly open in another tab several links from a page, for instance a search page.

This is a hindrance if you rely on the "Restore previous session" when you are in the middle of a task that requires several tabs to be open. You power down the computer, and when you come back and power it on you use "Restore previous session" from the History menu to open them all again... you find that some tabs are competely blank, not only the browsing space but the address bar too. The address was put there, but never registered as introduced, not event to provide a 404 error - so the Restore command finds nothing to restore for that tab. And sometimes you will not even remember what the page was, or even if you remember it would be a page where you arrived in by browsing, and you would not have the bookmark, and you could not retrace the steps that led you there, so the page is lost. Quite frustrating.