306412 - Specific banner ad in Yahoo! Mail causes that window or tab to ignore mouse clicks.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[g_alan_e]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

There's a Volkswagen Passat Flash banner ad in the current rotation on Yahoo!
Mail. Every time this ad appears, the window or tab it's in stops responding to
mouse clicks in the web page area. The cusor never changes to the hand/pointer
and right clicking anywhere only opens the popup menu that open when not
rightclicking on a link or image. Right clicking the Flash ad does not open the
Flash menu. The direct URL to the flash ad is
http://creativeby1.unicast.com/assets/A9/N44/M62/C1604/vw_passat_728x90.swf
Immediately above this in the Media tab on the Page Info dialog, there's an
"Object" listed with no info, everything is shown as Unknown, Not Specified,
(Not Cached). The dimensions are listed as 728x90 but the Physical dimensions
are both zero. When loaded in Firefox by itself, the ad behaves normally,
displays the Netscape style hand/pointer when moused over but does nothing
(doesn't go to the Volkswagen site) when clicked. I get over 200 e-mails a day,
which I go through in one session. This ad appears three to five times or more
in that many messages.

The only "fix" is to close that window or tab then go back to Yahoo! Mail, until
the same ad comes around and stops Firefox again. Fortunately its effect is
restricted to the window it appears in.

I don't know if the same ad shows up anywhere else. The only time I've
encountered this no-click-response problem is with that specific ad in Yahoo!
Mail in Firefox.

I cannot view and copy the page source or save the page. Yahoo! Mail has some
protection against doing that, all I get is an HTML file or source that displays
the "Message viewing error" page.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Get a Yahoo! Mail Account.
2.Set your personal info to what should cause Yahoo! Mail to fill the banner ad
rotation with automotive related advertisements.
3.Subscribe to some mailing lists so you get lots of e-mail.
4.Open e-mail until the Volkswagen Passat ad comes along and stops the Firefox
window from responding to clicks.

Actual Results:  
The Firefox window displaying this particular ad stops responding to mouse
clicks in the page display area when it appears while using the Yahoo! Mail web
interface. It's 100% reproducible, but dependent on the Yahoo server sending out
a certain flash file.

Expected Results:  
Working like it does when displaying any other banner ad. ;)

A screencap of the problem causing banner ad for easy recognition.
http://members.ispwest.com/gregg1/badvert/Passat-bug.jpg

Comment 1

[g_alan_e]

Apparently Volkswagen read my e-mail about it and fixed their ad, without so
much as a "Thanks for bringing this to our attention." in reply. I've
encountered the ad three times today and it didn't cause the problem.

So the problem is "fixed", but by the cause changing its behaviour instead of
updating Firefox to not exhibit the non-responsive problem, so now it can't be
figured out why this browser did that when IE and others didn't. (Unless the
banner ad's creators will talk to the Firefox team!)

Comment 2

[John]

So this is a WFM.....