455420 - Facebook Chat Connection Issue

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[John]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080915032512 Minefield/3.1b1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080915032512 Minefield/3.1b1pre

After having the Facebook page open for 20 seconds, Facebook chat does not work.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log into Facebook
2. Take note of the Facebook Chat on the bottom bar and make sure it is enabled
3. After about 20 seconds, it will disconnect
4. Control-F5 will make it work again, where it will again disconnect after about 20 seconds
Actual Results:  
The chat doesn't connect and you get the following Facebook error message: "Could not connect to Facebook Chat at this time"

Expected Results:  
Chat should not stop working

I'm assuming it's something that with the AJAX that doesn't keep the connection alive. It works in IE and Google Chrome. I have JIT disabled.

Comment 1

[John]

Either Facebook fixed something or something was checked in that fixed the issue.

Marking resolved.

Comment 2

[John]

it's happening again

Comment 3

[eliazu]

happens to me too on firefox 3.1b (and any new alpha trunks until 2.11.2008) on windows vista.

Comment 4

[Austin Nooe]

Yeah, this is happening to me. It's doing the exact same thing.

Comment 5

[John]

Facebook replied to me and said they were aware of it and will be working on resolving it soon. I'll leave this open just in case, but I don't think it's Mozilla.

Comment 6

[cmtalbert]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Facebook replied to me and said they were aware of it and will be working on
> resolving it soon. I'll leave this open just in case, but I don't think it's
> Mozilla.
If this isn't Mozilla, then we ought to mark it as "Invalid" (i.e. not our bug).

Thoughts?
--> Invalid?

Comment 7

[Francesco Castellana]

Not being Mozilla's fault the most logical thing would be marking it as invalid, but if doing so will keep this bug away from the simple searches, I fear many duplicates might be filed until this gets resolved by Facebook.

Comment 8

[cmtalbert]

That's ok.  I'll keep an eye out for dupes.  We also have to try to keep the unconfirmed count down.

Comment 10

[Mike Tigas]

As I noted in Bug 456392, I had a hunch that this regression happened around the TraceMonkey landing back in August and I confirmed it 

In nightly builds, I narrowed the moz-central TM landing between 2008-08-21 and 2008-08-22 -- the former lacks the JIT-related prefs in about:config, the latter has them.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/20080821034539 Minefield/3.1a2pre
  * Chat works. Forever.
  * Downloaded build from http://is.gd/9H8F

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/20080822033426 Minefield/3.1a2pre
  * Chat works for 30-60sec and then shows the connection error as above.
  * Downloaded build from http://is.gd/9H8N

Ran both builds with a fresh profile and in safe mode. javascript.options.jit.content is disabled by default in the 08-22 build but this issue persists regardless of that setting.

The current 1.9.1 build under latest-trunk performs in the same way as the 2008-08-22 build. (Tried with javascript.options.jit.content set to true AND false.)
  * Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre)
    Gecko/20081130 Minefield/3.1b3pre

Both have a few warnings in Error Console regarding some CSS, but no JS-related errors or any Error Console differences between the working and non-working builds.

While Facebook may be "aware of the issue" and "are working on it," it might not be unreasonable that this is still an issue on the Mozilla side. (Obviously, things changed in the JS interpreter between those builds.)

Might be worth a shot to dig through the bug 449436 and bug 451602 dependencies. Should also probably contact Facebook again, regarding this. (I can see to that one.)

Comment 11

[E Letuchy]

(From Facebook)
This seems to be due to a change with respect to whether window.postMessage is a Function (and inherits any augments of the Function prototype).
In FF 3.0, postMessage inherited from Function. In FF 3.1, it doesn't.
I guess we'll change our code.

Comment 12

[E Letuchy]

The repro:

 Function.prototype.bug = true;
 var a = function() {};
 typeof a.bug != "undefined"; // true
 typeof window.postMessage.bug != "undefined"; // true

Comment 13

[E Letuchy]

Make that:
 typeof window.postMessage.bug != "undefined"; // false

Comment 14

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

> Function.prototype.bug = true;
> typeof window.postMessage.bug != "undefined"; // false
For reference, this was fixed in bug 500691 for Firefox 3.5.1. Please complain loudly (e.g. in newsgroups, by setting blocking? flags) about such issues.