Page MenuHomePhabricator

Firefox 3.6: Clicking on proposal in search bar does not go to page
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Author: jhmaxon

Description:
I'm not sure if this is the proper place for this topic. Feel free to move if need be, but anyway the last week or so the search bar on Wikipedia has not been working properly. When I type in something in the search bar and I select the suggestion I want it does not automatically start loading the page. I have to press enter or the magnifying glass this to load page. I'm on windows 7 and x and use Firefox 3.6.x. any help out be appreciated and thank you in advance


Version: 1.23.0
Severity: minor

Details

Reference
bz62858

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 22 2014, 3:04 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz62858.

Thanks for taking the time to report this!

Which exact website is this about?

I select the suggestion

How exactly?

Firefox 3.6 is Grade B only ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility ) hence setting lowest priority.

jhmaxon wrote:

(In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #1)

Thanks for taking the time to report this!

Which exact website is this about?

En.wikipedia.org/wiki/main_page and any page on this wikipedia, and wiktionary

I select the suggestion

How exactly?

This is what I did.

  1. For example I type "fr"

2 a list of suggestions pops up below

  1. "France" happens to be a suggestion
  2. I click "france" with mouse and it just completes entry in search bar and does nothing else. In order to go to that article I have to press "enter" on my keyboard to load page. If I do this on Google Chrome it automatically loads the page after I click suggestion. Try to do the same thing with the browser I'm using and with Google Chrome and you will see what i mean.Any way I apologize for taking so long to reply. Thank you

Works for me in Firefox 27. No plans to investigate issues with such an old Firefox version, however contributed patches would be accepted.

jhmaxon wrote:

Since there is no intention to further investigate the bug, how do I Contribute patch? Thank you for your time anyway

See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker but I myself cannot offer help finding the right place in the code. :-/

Confirmed on Iceweasel/3.5.16

Clicking on the suggestion fills out the search box, but does not submit

jhmaxon wrote:

Thank you Bawolf that is the exact problem I'm having. Thank you for wording it better.

I installed Firefox 3.6 to do some testing, and googled around.

The suggestions list entries you're clicking on are simple links (<a> elements), with some magic dust sprinkled on them to e.g. update the form field when you click them (in addition to doing the default link action – sending you to the target page).

These additional actions also include hiding the list of suggestions, which means hiding the link that was just clicked. This happens during the handling of the default action (visiting the target page).

The problem is that Firefox 3.6, unlike other browsers, will not perform the default action if the link is not visible to the user – and it isn't, because we've just hidden it. It doesn't care that it was visible when clicked.

We could probably try working around this by hiding the list after the new page starts loading. The code is rather brittle, though, so this will require some boring testing :(

Change 121701 had a related patch set uploaded by Bartosz Dziewoński:
jquery.suggestions: Hide the suggestions list asynchronously

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/121701

The patch above seems to make it work for Firefox 3.6 and seems to not to break anything for other browsers, but I'd appreciate if someone who cares about 3.6 could test both of these things more thoroughly. :)

jhmaxon wrote:

The above mentioned patch did not work for me on Firefox 3.6.28

jhmaxon wrote:

It is hard to believe that something like this would be caused compatibility issues with software. I take it that this will go unresolved?

The patch above works for me. How did you test it?

If it doesn't solve the issue, then this bug will probably stay opened at lowest priority forever / until we officially drop support for old Firefox, unless of course someone decides to fix it better; personally I have more interesting and rewarding things to do :), I don't think the WMF cares, and this just makes using the search a bit annoying rather than impossible.

I would recommend updating your browser.

Change 121701 merged by jenkins-bot:
jquery.suggestions: Hide the suggestions list asynchronously

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/121701

Should be fixed now! (But not yet deployed on Wikimedia wikis, that'll happen in around two weeks.) I'd appreciate if you could verify the fix.

jhmaxon wrote:

The fix is greatly appreciated. Thank you