344646 - gContextMenu.searchSelected does not return any text

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[leftie friele]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060710 Firefox/2.0b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060710 Firefox/2.0b1

I have written a simple extension which retrieves the selected text and opens a new tab. 
The extension work well when I installed it 3-4 times. But after FF crashed, due to reasons I don't know the gContextMenu.searchSelected() does not return any text. 
The extension runs perfectly with the 1.5 instalation, but in FF 2 beta 1 it just wont work anymore. I am not sure if this is due to some error installing my extension or if there is some other bug causing this. Maybe it is related to the crash I had previously.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Bernd Giesen]

I'd also developed a FF extension using a gContextMenu.searchSelected() call, which worked fine until (including) FF 1.5.0.7. With FF2 it does no longer! :-(((
The "Firebug" debugger tells me while attempting to perform the corresponding Javascript code that "gContextMenu.searchSelected() is not a function"...

Comment 2

[Ben Basson]

You can use browser.js function getBrowserSelection(aCharLen) as a replacement, where the string returned will be 0 to aCharLen characters in length, to a maximum of 150 chars.

This bug is probably invalid, unless there's any particular reason to still support the old method.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

At this point, yeah, there's no point in having 3.0 support a function name from 1.5 that 2.0 didn't have. At some point, though, we may have to start treating browser.js functions as semi-frozen APIs, and translate calls to the old name into calls to the new, as best we can (since sometimes it's just s/Crappy name/Good name/ and sometimes it's s/Crappy function with bad params/Good function with sane params/).