[Gllug] Guardian Home Page and Mozilla

[Stuart Children]

Hiya

Sorry for not replying earlier - been a bit busy and reading of my GLLUG
mail slipped.

I'm a developer at Guardian Unlimited, so allow me to explain.
Disclaimer: all comments and views are my own.

Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> On Monday 19 April 2004 09:24, Peter Adamson wrote:
> 
>>Adrian McMenamin wrote:
>>
>>>What is it on http://guardian.co.uk that causes my mozilla to crash
>>>*every* time I try to view it - I am running:
>>>
>>>Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030922

It's also a GTK2 enabled build right? (Sticking "about:buildconfig" in
the URL bar will tell you.) Which distribution and GTK+ version OOI?

>>It maybe the javascript ticker
>>Turn off javascript & see what happens.
> 
> Seems to fix it right enough. Who's to blame the Guardian or Mozilla's 
> implementation?

It's Mozilla I'm afraid. Specifically the bug is in the GTK2 stuff -
when some kind of widget creation event is being fired from JavaScript.
At least that's as far as I managed to track it down, I never got to the
specific bug number. There used to be a warning being issued for this,
but something changed during development before 1.5 that caused an event
not to be caught and resulted in the crash. </part guesswork> This was
fixed during development for 1.6. It affects any platform using a GTK2
enabled build (confirmed on at least one of the BSDs for example).

For what it's worth, I've seen the same crash on other sites (mainly
ones that are a lot more JavaScript heavy than us).

So, we're aware of the problem. The JavaScript code itself is not doing
anything onerous so we can't change that. There are two obvious work
arounds: 1) upgrade to a more recent version of Mozilla (1.7 has many
improvements and GTK integration fixes, so I would recommend that when
it's out shortly), or 2) disable JavaScript (obviously non-ideal). We
also try to help out by not executing the ticker functions if you appear
to be using an affected version. This is based on the user-agent, so if
you change that you're out of luck. Currently it blocks all Gecko
browsers which are based on 1.5, and are on platforms other than Windows
or Mac. We can't tell whether they've compiled with GTK2 or not, so we
block regardless.

Now, there's a slight complication in that it appears (and I've not
investigated this enough to swear by it) that recent GTK+ versions will
also cause the crash with Mozilla versions before 1.5. Which I expect is
what's happening in your case. Are you using Mandrake 9.2 per chance?
Unfortunately you're in a tiny minority. Almost all Mozilla 1.4 builds
will not cause this crash, so we want to run the ticker for them.

If you're not happy with that then please let userhelp at guardian.co.uk
know - this is staffed by real people and they'll pass it on to someone
who can make decisions about it. If anyone spots any browser
compatibility problems in future, please do write to that address.

We are very committed to ensuring our site runs cross platform and on
all modern standards-compliant browsers, as well as being accessible to
all; and are continuously working to improve things where we can. This
is a rather big task, so please have patience. :)

HTH

-- 
Stuart

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