Firefox users who found themselves updating to a new version of the popular web browser over the weekend can thank FarmVille for making it happen.
Farmville pulls in almost 64 million active users per month. Per month. It’s the most popular application on Facebook, which is of course the most popular thing in the universe. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that when something goes wonky, there’s some hustle in the effort to get it fixed.
That’s how an issue with the Flash plug-in in the previous version of Firefox takes on a whole different kind of priority when it’s framed as a problem with FarmVille. According to the bug report, version 3.6.4 of Firefox was timing out on certain Flash applications, which doesn’t sound all that terribly interesting until it’s translated to mean that people can’t play FarmVille anymore.
“There’s a massive regression in user experience for a meaningful number of users of an extremely popular property,” Mozilla’s Mike Shaver wrote in the bug report comments, describing the problem as only a tech guy can. “We can and should investigate better event look behavior, perhaps even before the next non-chemspill release, but for now we need to get out of a bad hole before it gets any worse.”
Apparently there are people out there who care about your stupid farm after all.
via: Gamasutra