United Airlines boarding pass PDF (served as blob URI) only offers to print 1 page, despite the actual PDF having 3 pages
Categories
(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: dholbert, Unassigned)
References
Details
Attachments
(1 file)
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187.15 KB,
image/png
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Details |
screenshot of bug
Steps to reproduce the problem:
- Check in to a United Airlines flight with multiple people in your party (3 people in my case)
- On their website's "choose one or more options to receive your boarding pass" UI, click "Open PDF". This opens a multi-page PDF (3 pages for me, since I've got 3 people)
- Open print preview, but NOT by clicking the print button in our PDF UI -- instead, do Ctrl+P or File|Print or Hamburger Menu | Print.
What is the expected behavior? (add screenshot)
3 pages of output.
What went wrong? (add screenshot)
Print Preview (and actual-printing) only behaves as if there's 1 page of output.
ADDITIONAL NOTES:
- If I use the print icon in our PDF-viewer UI, the bug doesn't reproduce; print-preview offers to print all 3 pages.
- If I save the PDF to disk and then repeat the STR with the saved copy, the bug doesn't reproduce. So the bug seems to be specific to the way that the PDF is opened/served by the site (as a blob URI in a new-tab that shows
about:blankin the URL bar).
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Reporter | |
Updated•1 year ago
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Reporter | |
Comment 1•1 year ago
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Comment 2•1 year ago
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This isn't profile-specific -- I can reproduce in a fresh Firefox profile with current Firefox Nightly 130.0a1 (2024-07-09) (64-bit) on Linux (using my checkin details for my flight tomorrow).
For what it's worth, the Web Console shows this error message:
Warning: Invalid absolute docBaseUrl: "blob:https://www.united.com/5fd09001-25cd-4fa8-adee-ede0ef596e10". pdf.worker.mjs:345:13
PDF 9b14e7e461c9c81e6296a2a82c1932ce [1.2 United Airlines via ABCpdf / -] (PDF.js: 4.4.140 [2fbd61944])
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Comment 3•1 year ago
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This is not a regression (or not a recent one), too; I can reproduce in Nightly 2022-01-01. (Can't go back much further; Nightly from 1 year earlier can't get far enough through the United website to view my boarding pass, due to United depending on some JS/DOM feature that wasn't present back then.)
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Comment 4•1 year ago
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"good news", this reproduces in Chrome as well. It's a site bug, not a browser bug.
It looks superficially like United is loading the PDF directly, but in fact they are not! Instead, they load a trivial HTML document which just has a full-screen embedded PDF viewer like so:
<html>
<object type="application/pdf" data="blob:https://www.united.com/[some-UUID-here]" style="position: fixed; inset: 0px; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></object>
When you use the browser UI to print the document, you're actually printing that HTML document, rather than the PDF itself, which is why you just end up with 1 page. Whereas if you use the print icon in the PDF viewer, you invoke the intended PDF-printining functionality.
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Comment 5•1 year ago
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would it make sense for us to bypass this ?
I had the same issue recently and it was confusing
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Comment 6•1 year ago
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Probably we don't want to directly intervene here. I think we tend to tread carefully when making interventions to sites in cases where we can't reliably tell whether the intervention is still needed (or potentially has started causing harm). And unfortunately in this case, there's no easy way to test this, since you can't just on-demand go and try to print a United boarding pass.
One thing that might be worth doing to help mitigate this (to benefit users of this site and others): we could detect that we're embedding a PDF viewer in a larger document, and that it occupies most/all of your viewport. In that circumstance, we could perhaps intercept browser Print options (Ctrl+P, File|Print, etc) and notify the user that the website that they're viewing has chosen to embed a PDF in a shorter document, and we could perhaps point the user at the PDF-viewer's print button and offer to open the PDF directly in a new tab.
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Comment 7•1 year ago
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I filed bug 1906967 on what I described in comment 6.
Description
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