319855 - In Bookmark Manager, 'Sort folder…' leads to error message (regression)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 318866

(SeaMonkey :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Michael Graubart]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051210 SeaMonkey/1.5a
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051210 SeaMonkey/1.5a

If 'Manage Bookmarks' is selected, a folder is highlighted, the mouse-button is held down and 'Sort folder…' is selected from the resulting menu, a very large yellow window appears with the following message: 

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: chrome://communicator/content/bookmarks/sortFolder.xul
Line Number 97, Column 19:                  <menuitem value="ascending" label="&sortAscending.label;"/>

This message-window then cannot be got rid of and SeaMonkey has to be closed down and restarted.

I have checked back to the 20051130 build, and the bug is present in that, but it is not present in Mozilla 1.7.12.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. 'Manage Bookmarks' is selected.
2. A folder is highlighted.
3. The mouse-button is held down.
4. 'Sort folder…' is selected from the resulting menu.

Actual Results:  
A very large yellow window appears with the following message: 

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: chrome://communicator/content/bookmarks/sortFolder.xul
Line Number 97, Column 19:                  <menuitem value="ascending" label="&sortAscending.label;"/>

NB: This message-window then cannot be removed without closing down SeaMonkey.

Expected Results:  
A dialog should have appeared, allowing one to determine the way the folder is to be sorted, and then sorting should have taken place.

eMac G4, OS X 10.3.9, Classic theme.

Comment 1

[Michael Graubart]

Last build of SeaMonkey to be free of this bug: 2005112810.
First to show bug: 2005112909.

I hope all those hardworking and dedicated experts who are developing SeaMonkey will not be offended and will take the following remarks in the positive spirit in which they are meant when I (as a non-expert user and devotee of SeaMonkey) say that I am dismayed by the way in which, in recent weeks, successive builds have accrued more and more serious bugs which directly impact on ordinary users. Examples are the present Bookmarks Manager one, the failure of Drop-Down Menus to drop down and the failure of Password Manager to remember names and passwords. 

I am sure all sorts of subtle enhancements which are invisible to the naked eye are being introduced, but in my humble opinion all efforts should be devoted to eliminating such major bugs (which actually make it hard, or even impossible, to use SeaMonkey for ordinary, everyday tasks) before adding new features or tinkering with problems that most users never encounter. (It is, surely, also regretable that some of these major bugs have got into the latest release of FireFox: the Bookmarks Manager one is not applicable; the Password Manager bug does not appear in FireFox 1.5; but the Drop-Down Menu one does).

I hope the apparent lack of attention to these major bugs in Mac builds is not due to a lack of concern for Mac users. Mac users may not be numerically as great as PC/Windows users, but they make up in quality (especially in the graphics, the photographic and and generally the arts worlds) what they lack in quantity! 

Comment 2

[Michael Graubart]

Further information re Bookmarks Manager: 'Sort folder by name' does not result in such an error message; only 'Sort folder…' does.

Comment 3

[zug_treno]

Duplicate of bug 318866 -> Firefox bug 301562.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 301562 ***

Comment 4

[Michael Graubart]

This bug is still present in Build 2005121210. 

As far as I (from the point of view of a user rather than a programmer) can see, this may be connected with Bug No.301562, but it is not the same. 301562 refers to sort-order, whereas 319855 makes sorting impossible altogether, since the error message appears instead of the sorting dialog, and cannot be removed without quitting.

Comment 5

[zug_treno]

(In reply to comment #4)
> As far as I (from the point of view of a user rather than a programmer) can
> see, this may be connected with Bug No.301562, but it is not the same. 

See bug 318866 comment 1. 

Bug 318866 was reopened in the mean time, would you like me to mark this bug as duplicate of bug 318866?

Comment 6

[Michael Graubart]

Re Comment #5: 318866 does seem to be the same as this one (319855), though I quoted the error message slightly more fully in the latter report, as below. But I don't think I am competent to say whether the two bugs should be marked as duplicates; perhaps someone in higher authority should decide! 

Comment 7

[OstGote!]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 318866 ***

Comment 8

[Michael Graubart]

Wonderful! I confirm that on my system (eMac G4, OS X 10.3.9, Classic theme) this bug has been resolved.