FireBible Problems

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http://x-tige.com/designers/alexa-wagner-fall-winter-2011/ Unfortunately there have been a couple of issues rendering FireBible defunct on recent versions of Firefox.

  1. First, there was a security vulnerability in Java 7 update 6 and below. This lead to these versions of Java being disabled; if you updated your Java installation, it would be enabled again, but loading text in FireBible fails with

    Ranchi org.xml.sax.SAXException: Could not compile stylesheet javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException: Could not compile stylesheet at org.crosswire.common.xml.TransformingSAXEventProvider.provideSAXEvents(TransformingSAXEventProvider.java:174) at org.crosswire.common.xml.XMLUtil.writeToString(XMLUtil.java:85) at …

    I’m not too sure if this was caused by changes in Java 7 update 7 (or later) or if it was the switch to JAXP 1.4.6 in Java 7 update 4 – nevertheless, you are now forced to use a version of Java in which the above error occurs.

  2. The second issue is a change in Firefox version 16 (16.0.1 is now current) where the “java” global variable was removed. I was warned by the addons team in advance, but failed to make changes in time (however, we’d still be stymied by the above problem).

The good news is that I do know how to solve both problems, but am currently looking for a better solution for the first of these. I’ll try to release a fix ASAP.

This extension has always been a technical challenge, which is fun most of the time, but the battle with Java in the browser has been a PITA – it still won’t work with IcedTea due to more permission problems. I’m wondering if I should go native instead and switch from JSword to Sword, the crossover will be quite expensive in terms of time and effort, but will probably add long term stability to FireBible. A Java installation (specifically, the Oracle one) would no longer be required and we wouldn’t be plagued by these incessant security issues.

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