1573611 - Slack channel topic sometimes concatenates multiple channels' topics together

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Attachment: Slack_topic_screenshot.png

I noticed yesterday and today that Slack's channel header section sometimes doesn't seem to refresh correctly when switching channels. I sometimes see a combination of the previous channel's and the new channel's topics in the new channel's header.

I first saw this problem on 2019-08-12, but I hadn't updated my Firefox Nightly since 2019-08-09, so the regression range might be August 9-12. I haven't been able to reproduce in a clean profile in 70 Nightly, so either I haven't been patient enough when trying to reproduce or the problem is related to some extension I have installed.

The attached screenshot shows a channel's topic as four GitHub URLs (from four different channels) concatenated. I'm not sure if having a URL in the channel topic is related to the problem or just that most of the channels I visit that specify any topic text include URLs.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Oops. Moving to Core::General because this is not a GeckoView bug.

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Attachment: Slack_topic_html.txt

Here is an devtools inspector snapshot of the DOM nodes of an affected channel's topic. Even though the topic screenshot shows four different URLs, the DOM snapshot shows about 100 duplicated <a> nodes in the topic HTML.

Comment 3

[Nhi Nguyen (:nhi)]

moving to DOM. Feel free to bounce it back to me if it's the wrong component.

Comment 4

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

nothing hints this is a DOM: Core bug. We need a regression range or something here.

Comment 5

[Nhi Nguyen (:nhi)]

Chris, do you have more information on this bug, STR or more debug info?

Comment 6

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

(In reply to Nhi Nguyen (:nhi) from comment #5)

Chris, do you have more information on this bug, STR or more debug info?

Unfortunately, I don't have any other details, though I just reproduced the bug again in Nightly 70.0a1 build 2019-08-16. The bug is intermittent, so it would be difficult to bisect with mozregression. But I can try...

Comment 7

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

I think this bug is triggered by chutten's "Slack Direct" extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/slack_direct/

With this extension enabled, I can reproduce this bug at least as far back as Firefox 64 from 2018. So I don't think this is a Firefox bug (or at least not a recent regression). This bug was either caused by a recent Slack update or has existed all along and I just never noticed before.

Reliable STR:

1. Enable the Slack Direct extension.
2. Switch back and forth between the #android-components and #firefox-for-fire-tv channels on mozilla.slack.com.
3. Watch for the #firefox-for-fire-tv channel header's URL (https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/dashboard/firefox-fire-tv) to appear in the #android-components channel header.

I'm going to close this bug as INVALID, unless chutten (as author of the Slack Direct extension) thinks this is a Firefox bug or a content bug worth reaching out to Slack web developers about.

Comment 8

[Chris H-C :chutten|PTO (back July 13)]

It would make sense as these topics contain links that Slack will try to redirect through slack-redir. Mutation Observers don't seem to have much in the way of timing guarantees, so there's likely a race when it comes to links in titles.

I've filed https://github.com/chutten/slack-direct/issues/3 for further investigation. I see no reason to suspect that this is anything more than a Slack Direct bug.