Closed Bug 581123 Opened 14 years ago Closed 14 years ago

Direct web links to Facebook Pages do not display

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
major

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: nypctechman, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.7) Gecko/20100713 Firefox/3.6.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.7) Gecko/20100713 Firefox/3.6.7

When accessing directly a personal page, for example: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Haier/68476763398?ref=s
Once initiated the process starts.
changes to:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Haier/68476763398?ref=s
changes to:
http://www.facebook.com/Haieramerica?ref=s

Once this process is completed the website goes to a done status and does not come up.

I have tried this to business and personal pages from many on my list and the same occurs every time.  

I am one of the IT Administrators for Haier America and one of our users reported the issues, in this case for our own company's Face book profile and the result in the investigations came to be a Firefox specific issue.  Internet explorer for example in this respect pulls up the link successfully.

Please advise and assist if possible.  
Thank you for all of your hard work to make Firefox our browser of choice.

Nathan Plotkin

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Open Firefox
2.In web address location point to: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Haier/68476763398?ref=s
3. Status goes to done and does not come up.
Actual Results:  
Status goes to done and does not come up.


Expected Results:  
To hit the website I requested.

Have provided insight to the issue and created a log file of the occurrence with an option to send this to Mozilla if the result was a Firefox software problem as it has turned out to be in this case.

Given the popularity of Face book with it's 500 million users, I would say this is a serious issue and people will point to alternative browsers for use in this respect.  This issue could potentially cause harm to personal computers everywhere as people who use Firefox neglect to ever turn on another browser and the alternative in the majority is IE.  IE as we both know is horrible and a serious security risk to giving the user spy ware and other potential hazardous code.
I can't reproduce this on Windows 7, either logged in or logged out.
(Also, while we appreciate your analysis, the last paragraph of the report isn't germane to the issue at hand!)
Nathan: when you hit this issue, is there any error in the Error Console (visible under the Tools menu)?
Redirects leading to page works fine for me in both Mac and WinXP using 3.6.8pre, logged in and logged out. Will try 3.6.7 specifically next.

Meanwhile do you have any add-ons or plugins installed? Do you get the same problem if you run Firefox in "safe-mode"? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode
In our company we use firefox and have it set to auto update itself. 3.6.7 is the version we currently use. All systems are windows xp service pack 3. I will check tomorrow for any errors in the tool box and I will try this in safe mode and will get back to you shortly. Thanks for your assistance.
We're hearing reports in our support forums of this happening on IE7 and Chrome, and suspect that it was a Facebook problem which leaked out and then remained in caches.
Also can you try clearing your cache (after giving the info above).  

Go to Tools > Clear Private Data select Everything in the dropdown and select ONLY cache.  Then try again.  

Based on reports that this also happened to some users in other browsers, I suspect that facebook was serving bad code for a little while or to some users and your Firefox managed to cache it during that time.

Thanks.
And by Clear Private Data, I mean Clear Recent History
I will double check this also but I must say that I make this a habit and when I do see a problem developing I always immediately ctrl shift delete and clear everything. Problem persisted. Manually remove of local pc temp files just to make sure as well. Can't remember if history was checked. Will let you know tomorrow. However if it is selected along with clearing everything is then this problem goes back to firefox.
Nathan: not sure that's an accurate way to do science :) We're seeing reports that this is a Facebook issue, though we're happy to continue to investigate.
So it works in IE but not in firefox and it's a facebook issue huh ?
WFM with a stock Firefox 3.6.7 running on WinXP SP3 -- page comes up fine.
No, we're seeing reports that users are having the same problem in IE7 and Chrome, and nobody here is able to reproduce. The reports are implicating:

 - problems with proxies (are you behind a Squid proxy?)
 - problems with cookies / cache entries

If we can reproduce the problem, we can fix it. If we can't reproduce the problem, we can't fix it.

If you can reproduce the problem, and give us relevant error console entries, that would help!
Other reports indicating that it's to do with allowing Facebook to remember one's credentials, once again implying cookies.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=788#!/help/?faq=17249 may be a good place to also try to get help.
Resolved thank you
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Glad the problem got resolved, Nathan! Thanks for the quick report and working with us to see it through. We're in touch with Facebook as well to figure out what went wrong and make sure they weren't triggering some bug in Firefox.
Resolution: FIXED → INVALID
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