311205 - A red caret shows up bellow the status bar.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jose Pina Coelho]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4

Just upgraded from FireFox 1.0.7 to 1.8b1.  On startup, I get a red caret bellow
the status bar, left aligned with a vertucal space of about the navigation and
bookmarks toolbars put together.  No clue to what is generating it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Just start firefox
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Red caret on bottom

Expected Results:  
The window was supposed to end with the status bar.

Using the DOM Inspector on the window, I found out that that space corresponds
to a node called #document->window->sourcetext->#text with a namespace URI of
http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/xml/parsererror.xml

Comment 1

[Jose Pina Coelho]

After searching with the dom inspector, I decided to check the extensions, and
lo and behold: two copies of the linky extension (2.6.0 and 2.7.0), now, linky
was updated during the upgrade to this version of firefox, so maybe there is a
race condition that allows a new version of an extension to to be loaded without
completely clearing out the previous one ?

This was seriously hosing up the works (ctrl-n didn't open a new window and some
menu entries would hang the whole menu bar).

Comment 2

[Adam Guthrie]

Yeah. This happens when extensions aren't compatable and break stuff. Could you
post a screenshot of the error message or just type it out so I can find out if
this needs to be dupes against another bug?

Comment 3

[Jose Pina Coelho]

Well, the whole message consists of the red "^" (not much information there),
and the status bar is 1/2" above it, leaving about 1/2" bellow it (17" screen).

Sadly I forgot to capture a screen shot.

I've tried to reinstall link 2.6.0 and 2.7.0 on top of it, but this time the
extension upgrade worked correctly, so I have no way to even reproduce it.

Comment 4

[Adam Guthrie]

Yeah, this was just caused by one of your extensions not being compatable with
1.5b1.

Comment 5

[Jose Pina Coelho]

Would it be possible to have a context menu that would allow us to find which
extension/module opened that particular pane ?  After all, a red caret doesn't
give much information.

Comment 6

[Adam Guthrie]

Usually there will be more information such as where the parsing error is. This
will usually allow you to tell which extension it is. Then there's always
process of elimination...

Comment 7

[Jose Pina Coelho]

Adam,

"usually" is well and good, until you try to think what a "standard user" will
make of it.

No context menu, and on this instance I had *half* a dozen extensions and one of
them was visibly duplicated.  Other than that, you'd be asking a "standard user"
to debug the whole shish-kebab.

We need a context menu that allows us to ask: "who producued the output I see
*here*".