615659 - htc sense fails to load in Firefox 4/Fennec

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: German, defect)

Description

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

While testing out my new htc desire hd i found a bug - reproducible in Firefox 4 Beta8pre and Fennec.

Steps to reproduce:
-> load htcsense like as example http://htcsense.com/de
-> black page

should load content like on safari etc.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Worksforme on Mac.  Is this mobile-specific?  Is the site sniffing?

Comment 2

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Worksforme on Mac.  Is this mobile-specific?  Is the site sniffing?

hm boris, did you selected a locale/country (that might be the point of failure - after that it should fail/show black page)

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Ah, no.  I'd just loaded the url in comment 0; I missed it redirecting.  I can confirm that if I then select "Deutschland" I get the issue.

It looks like their JS errors out due to this line:

  doc.head = doc.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];

which is setting a readonly property on the HTMLDocument (see bug 548828).  Unfortunately, we throw on attempts to set readonly DOM properties.

Perhaps we should change that for 2.0?

Comment 4

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

requesting blocking 2.0 since this website is a major feature in some new upcoming and well used htc phones

Comment 5

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Does webkit support the new document.head property, and if so, is it settable there?

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Webkit does, and it's readonly.  But it's the ECMAScript meaning of readonly, which means sets are just silently ignored (whereas we do it by having a throwing setter).  Testcase:

  javascript:document.head = 1; alert(document.head)

In this site's case, it's setting document.head to the value it "should" have anyway, so ignoring the set doesn't cause problems.

Comment 7

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

bz, I could have sworn you were right in that javascript: URI throwing, but I get an alert here, both on trunk and in beta7. I don't understand why though.

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Hrm.  That's really odd...  I see that too, though.  It certainly throws on the site!

Comment 9

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Nevermind, coment 3 is halfway on crack.  We report an error (using JS_ReportErrorFlagsAndNumber) but do NOT normally throw when writing to a readonly DOM property, as far as I can tell.  So there's an error in the error console, but no exception thrown to the script, usually.

The real issue is that this code:

  doc.head = doc.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];

occurs in https://www.htcsense.com/$WT$/de/services/boot-js.js on line 342.  And line 1 of that script is:

  "use strict";

And in ES5 strict mode, trying to write to a readonly property is _supposed_ to throw.

So this is just a site bug, I think.  ccing some JS folks to confirm, but also moving to evangelism.  This would break in any browser implementing strict mode correctly.

Comment 10

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Brendan, see comment 9.

Comment 11

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I _think_ I managed to mail their customer service; their site is really broken (e.g. 404 "Contact" links!).  If someone else has contacts there, please try them too?

Comment 12

[miloeng]

Works for me running firefox 4 on a desktop running windows 7 32bit. I selected a country; the link shows https://www.htcsense.com/us/# brings me to a login page.

Comment 13

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

It certainly doesn't work for me on Mac.  Maybe they're sniffing, in addition to everything else?

Comment 14

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

adding kev and christian, maybe they have a contact at htc

Comment 15

[sjw]

Works fine here.