869780 - NBC News white screen

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Dan Jacobson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:22.0) Gecko/20130503 Firefox/22.0 Iceweasel/22.0a2
Build ID: 20130503004014

Steps to reproduce:

Browsed http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/51810239/#51810239
in pristine Firefox.


Actual results:

Half the screen is white.

Comment 1

[Alice0775 White]

you should install Flash Player.

Comment 2

[Dan Jacobson]

I'm saying how could a major website, view in a major browser, be such a disaster?

I purposely used a pristine Firefox for this test.

Comment 3

[Dan Jacobson]

"You should install Flash Player" was not seen in the white area.
If that is what one should do, then the browser should say that to the user.

Comment 4

[Loic]

The website does it for you, see this disclaimer: http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/i/msnbc/Components/Video/_Player/configurations/videoRequirementAssets/UFS.jpg

Comment 5

[Dan Jacobson]

Can you please try this to get the white half screen,
su - nobody -c 'HOME=/tmp/$$ firefox http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/51810239/#51810239'

I notice it has found flashplayer on its own not that I wanted it to, but the screen is all white.

Comment 6

[Manuela Muntean [Away]]

I can't reproduce this issue with the latest Nightly build (build ID: 	20130513031057).

If you installed Flash, could you please update your GPU driver?

Could you please also try the following, to see if you still reproduce the issue :

1) try this with a clean profile: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

2) running in Safe mode: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

Comment 7

[Dan Jacobson]

1. My "su nobody" is much 'cleaner' and much 'safer' that the above.
2. On my 1MB ADSL line (slow) I can see what is really going on. Apparently we are staring at a half white screen waiting for it to download something... As in fact my connection meter shows tons of bytes flowing...

# su - nobody -c 'HOME=/tmp/$$ firefox http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/51810239/#51810239'
No directory, logging in with HOME=/

(process:10716): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_slice_set_config: assertion `sys_page_size == 0' failed
ALSA lib confmisc.c:768:(parse_card) cannot find card '0'
ALSA lib conf.c:4248:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:392:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:4248:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1251:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:4248:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:4727:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib pcm.c:2227:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default

... upon which it was already taking too long, so I killed it.

Comment 8

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

So it sounds like you are seeing this due a slow or bad connection and the Flash content simply doesn't finish downloading fast enough?

Comment 9

[Dan Jacobson]

OK but can you confirm that the whole first screenful of that page remains totally white for at least a full minute at least (with a 1MB connection.)

Comment 10

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

On OS X, when artificially limiting my bandwidth, it takes half a minute until it shows the loading indicator, while it's fine otherwise. 
Your connection quality may differ, so there doesn't seem to be anything broken here.

Comment 11

[Dan Jacobson]

So their website design is extremely poor?

Comment 12

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Possibly, it looks like it wasn't tested it with slower connection speeds - it should at least show a loading indicator in that time.
Note how the behaviour in other browsers is the same when loading it the first time, but how it's fine once it's cached.

Comment 13

[Alice0775 White]

Flash player appears on 192kbps network environment, It takes about 60-80seconds.