557458 - Back / Forward buttons sometimes get disabled for a tab.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Chris]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/523.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.12
Build Identifier: 3.6.2

This bug has been in FireFox through several versions on both PowerPC and Intel-based FireFox for the longest time, and I think that I just figured out how to reproduce it.  It turns out that certain sites/links break it.  Visit here:

http://www.plentyoffish.com/viewmatches.aspx

The problem is that once you visit this page, the enabled/disabled states of the back and forward buttons are stuck.  You can then visit another link, but you'll notice that the back button won't enable (unless it already was enabled).  You can then visit another tab that you have open, and the states will work fine, and when you revisit the broken tab, the states will take on whatever tab you last left.

There must be some code on that site that breaks the tab somehow.  I know that it's not just that site though, as I experience it all the time on a computer where I don't visit that site.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open new tab.
2. Visit http://www.plentyoffish.com/viewmatches.aspx
3. Go to address bar in same tab, type in any other web site and hit enter.
Actual Results:  
The back button will still be disabled!  This tab is now "broken" and will take on the back/forward enabled/disabled states of the last visited tab.

Comment 1

[Chris]

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it seems to fail on sites that use Google Analytics, specifically those that place the javascript code in the beginning of the code rather than the end.  (No difference between older Urchin.js and newer Ga.js.)  This might explain why the home page of http://plentyoffish.com doesn't break the tab, but the link http://plentyoffish.com/viewmatches.aspx does.

Comment 2

[Chris]

The above site (plentyoffish) only fails on the PowerPC.  On my Intel, it works fine.