518269 - Blank or badly formatted pages on Salon.com

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Camino Graveyard :: Page Layout, defect)

Description

[Jim Murphy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090815 Camino/1.6.9 (like Firefox/2.0.0.23)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090815 Camino/1.6.9 (like Firefox/2.0.0.23)

A lot of www.salon.com pages are coming out blank. A few others are displaying mis-formatted article text.

The page are OK on Safari, although they do be taking extra tim to display.e
Today is the first time I've seen this problwm. I have been using 1.6.9 for about a week without problemsa

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1 enter: http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/09/22/obama_overexposed/
2.or enter http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2009/09/23/the_right/
3. or enter http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/09/23/afghanistan/
Actual Results:  
blank or badly formatted page are displayed

Expected Results:  
well-formatted text

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

You should try this

1) with ad-blocking turned off;
2) with a fresh profile;
3) and if neither of the previous two fixes it, with 2.0b4 (back up your profile folder first if you intend to return to 1.6.x).

The pages all look normal in 2.0b4 to me (as have all Salon articles as far back as I can remember).

Comment 2

[philippe (part-time)]

And check you cookies exceptions list to Allow cookies from www.salon.com (Preferences > Privacy pane). I tried the linked pages in comment 0 with a nightly build and it went into an infinite loop trying to load the pages while I denied/blocked cookies from salon.com. I think that is a recent change on that site.

Comment 3

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> The page are OK on Safari, although they do be taking extra tim to display.e
> Today is the first time I've seen this problwm. I have been using 1.6.9 for
> about a week without problems

I think the Salon.com server is having problems.  I was able to reproduce the bug in my 1.6.10pre build with a fresh profile, and then I quit and launched it again with a new fresh profile and the pages loaded fine.  The fact that they're loading slowly in Safari sounds like it's having trouble fetching all the stylesheets, too.

My suggestion would be to force-reload the pages (Cmd-Shift-R) and see if that makes them display properly, and if not, come back to them later and try again.

Comment 4

[Stuart Morgan]

Weird, I can't ever get content other than the banner add in either 1.6.9 or Firefox 2.0.0.13; I was ready to close this as the site being incompatible with Gecko 1.8.1.

(I still suspect that whatever is happening, even though it's not reliable, is 1.8.1-specific given than 2.0b4 is fine.)

Comment 5

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2Fopinion%2Fwalsh%2Fpolitics%2F2009%2F09%2F22%2Fobama_overexposed%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=1&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.654 reports 80 errors, some of them very serious (XML parsing errors) that could account for the content failing to display.

OTOH, disabling JavaScript also makes the page display, so that could be the source of the problem.

Since Stuart's comment, I have been unable to get any of the Gecko 1.8.1 browsers that worked when I made comment 3 (Firefox 2.0.0.18, Camino 1.6.6, Camino 1.6.7, Camino 1.6.8, Camino 1.6.9, and my own Camino 1.6.10pre build) to display the pages again.

Given this, I suspect that Stuart's right; whatever the problem is, be it bad JS or bad HTML or bad ad-servers or intermittent/server rotation issues, is bad in a way that only affects Gecko 1.8.1.

Since this works fine (and reliably) in 2.0b4, closing this WFM.  If someone wants to dig into the site code and do some TE work, that's fine, too, but it's not something we can fix in Camino (or get fixed in Gecko 1.8.1).

Jim, your best bet here is probably to move to Camino 2.0b4; see item 3 in Chris's comment 1.

Comment 6

[philippe (part-time)]

(In reply to comment #5)

Strange, loads straight with Camino 1.6.9 here (after accepting the salon.com cookie). Could very well be issues with their load-balancing servers or whatever they use to speed up delivery.

(and using my local copy of the html validator, I only got 45 errors, mostly un-encoded ampersands and multiple usage of the same ID, not that it matters much).

Comment 7

[Jim Murphy]

2.0b4 works fine, thanks.

In light of the discussion above, I'll send a note referencing this bug 
to the  salon.com webmaster.