Ver­sion 0.4.6 was released no more than a free days ago, but unfor­tu­nately a change in the YouTube player exposed a bug that could cause browser crashes. Ver­sion 0.4.6.1 fixes the issue and updat­ing is recommended.

I’d also like to share some though and explain why we need to make so many point releases to keep things work­ing. Lightspark shares a lot of sim­i­lar­ity with the Wine project in my opin­ion, as both projects aims at reim­ple­ment­ing from scratch a large (huge for Wine, of course) plat­form for third party applications.

The “advan­tage” for Wine is that exe­cuta­bles for installed pro­grams (e.g. Microsoft Word) change not so often, and usu­ally updat­ing is under the con­trol of the user. A user that is inter­ested in keep­ing Wine com­pat­i­ble with a cer­tain appli­ca­tion is, most often, free to delay the update until Wine catches up.

Lightspark, on the other hand, needs to exe­cute con­tents (e.g. YouTube video player) that are mostly out of the user con­trol and new, incom­pat­i­ble, ver­sions of the con­tents may pop out at any­time and there is very lit­tle we can do about it.

The only way we can be faith­ful to the adver­tised “YouTube[*] sup­port” is to improve our code when­ever a break­age pops up. I under­stand this is also chal­leng­ing for dis­tros and pack­agers because the life span of our sta­ble releases is linked to quite unpre­dictable events and I’d like to say “thank you” to all the peo­ple pack­ag­ing lightspark for dis­tros in the wild. Your work is exceptional.

[*] As a side note, although cur­rently only YouYube sup­port is sta­ble enough to be used daily, Lightspark is not an YT spe­cific hack. Sup­port for other sites is com­ing along slowly given our lim­ited work­force. I’ve done some work to have hulu work­ing and I think we’re now 80% done in sup­port­ing it. If any­one is inter­ested in con­tribut­ing to lightspark to have Hulu (or any other pop­u­lar site) sup­ported, please drop by #lightspark IRC chan­nel on Freen­ode