153630 - washingtonpost.com - Does not display search box properly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Jeremy Manson]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020607
BuildID:    2002061014

On this page, there are little buttons marked "search".  Next to these buttons,
in IE, there are a couple of pulldowns and a search box, labelled "Sponsored by
CitySearch".  On Mozilla, there is nothing but a lilac colored field.

I tried this on OS X and Linux, so I am extrapolating to "all".  It is also
broken on the browser from which I am submitting, an earlier revision.

This is probably a dup of some well known bug, or a tech evangelism bug, but I
don't know enough of the ins and outs of standard HTML to know what to search
for on bugzilla.  I searched for "washingtonpost.com", but couldn't find anything.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch browser
2. Navigate to above URL

Comment 1

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Changing "document.object1.document.write(desc);"
to "document.getElementById('object1').innerHTML = desc;"
in one of the JavaScript files makes the search form appear.

-> Evangelism

Comment 2

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Reassigning...

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 156819 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Phil Schwartau]

*** Bug 164059 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Susie Wyshak]

-->bclary

Comment 6

[Jeremy Manson]

I don't want to jump the gun, but this page seems to work in 1.2.1

Comment 7

[Scott Kitterman]

I agree.  WFM using 1.2.1 on Win2K.

Comment 8

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

yep. looks fine. roll over the search displays the topic subsearch well. Thanks!

Comment 9

[Rich Renomeron]

Doesn't work for me on Linux, both on a custom build (pulled from the tree 11/30
 after the version strings changed), and on a build I got from mozilla.org. 
Jeremy Manson, what OS are you using?

If someone on Linux doesn't have this working (i.e. embarrass me), should it be
reopened, or should I submit a new bug?

Comment 10

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Rich,

If it is still borken on linux, please reopen but please try a fresh version of
mozilla and report the ua. 

Comment 11

[Jeremy Manson]

I tried 1.2.1 on Win32 and OS X.  Actually, I went back and tried 1.1 on Linux,
which, as you say, seems not to work  Perhaps they have some weird user-agent
detection badness.

Comment 12

[Rich Renomeron]

Still doesn't work with
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021207
(The build ID for this is 2002120705)
and
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130
(Couldn't find the Build ID for this one).

Someone more powerful than me needs to reopen this bug (Bugzilla wouldn't let me).

Comment 13

[Sören 'Chucker' Kuklau (gone)]

REOPENing as per comments nine through twelve.

WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021207
Chimera/0.6+ though.

Comment 14

[Rich Renomeron]

I get this message in my JavaScript console when I try to visit that page:

Error: document.getElementById("coretool") has no properties
Source File:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/entertainment/javascript/front/coretool.js
Line: 53

Any of the WFM's get this?  I'm not up on JavaScript, so I'm not sure what it means.

Comment 15

[kitchin]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021207 Phoenix/0.5

I find that if the lilac area remains blank, then the status bar shows:
"Transferring data from ad.doubleclick.net..."

Other times the page works correctly (though the lilac area runs over to the
right, with some improvement after the first mouseover).  In this case, the
status bar does not hang waiting for doubleclick.

So a test would be to mess up the doubleclick reference or proxy it out.  Or it
could be a cookie issue.

Note: popup blocking causes problems on some washingtonpost.com pages, such as
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/schedule.htm
I could not get any predictable result by toggling "Reject Popup Windows" for
the current bug's URL.  The pop-up blocking problem leads to a js error.

Error: poupwin has no properties
Source File: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/schedule.htm
Line: 15

Obvious.  Then clicking it to view source yields:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code:
0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getIntPref]"  nsresult:
"0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)"  location: "JS frame ::
chrome://cookie/content/cookieTasksOverlay.xul :: CookieTasksStartup :: line 84"
 data: no]

Comment 16

[kitchin]

Might be Bug 53967, see comment #28.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53967#c28

Javascipt may be waiting for network data to render, or it's hung up on a cookie.

Comment 17

[Rich Renomeron]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

This is definitely a UA-sniffing problem.  I installed uabar, and set the UA
string from the above to NS 7 on WinXP, and the search boxes appeared.

With respect to comment 15 and comment 16, I've noticed random "Transferring
data from ad.doubleclick.net..." "hangs" on many washingtonpost.com articles,
almost always involving pages with Obnoxious Flash Ads.  My guess is that
behavior isn't directly related to this bug.

Comment 18

[kitchin]

I saw the blank lilac field if and only if I had the "Transferring data from
ad.doubleclick.net..." status hanging.  I saw each case several times: both
succeed or both hang.  In addition, I don't think "doubleclick" is in the HTML
source; it's loaded from javascript.  That's why I suspect bad handling of a
network delay, or a cookie problem.  (I probably should not have posted all that
popup blocker stuff; I don't think that's related.)

Comment 19

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg

Comment 20

[Pascal Berger]

I think this bug can be closed, since I couldn't find anymore the mentioned
search boxes on the site

Comment 21

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

thanks pascal. wfm