Thanks to Passpack user Tim Robertson (aka FunkJedi) two bug fixes were rolled out yesterday: a misplaced Chrome back button alert, and the IE6 non-secure items alert.
Chrome Back Button Alert
As you may know, you should not use your browser’s back button with Passpack, because at best you’ll get logged out and have to log back in. At worst, you may loose any unsaved data. To avoid this, we use a Javascript library which simulates a disabled browser back button. When you click it, nothing seems to happen. If you click it a lot (like 7 times) then you get this warning:
The problem Tim ran into was that Google Chrome was giving him that error even though he’d not clicked the back button. Then it would repeat every 3 minutes or so. This was an odd bug as both Francesco and I use Chrome, and neither one of us has ever run into this issue.
By changing a single call, Francesco was able to fix the problem. If you’re interested in the technical details, here’s what he said was happening.
IE6 Non Secure Items Alert
This is one of those bugs that has been driving us crazy for some time now. All of Passpack’s images, Javascript, CSS and data travel over a secure https connection. Nonetheless, Explorer 6 was throwing up an alert that there were non-secure items on the page. We searched far and wide, but until now were not able to find the mysterious non-secure item.
While debugging the Chrome issue, Francesco discovered that the iframe the jQuery history plugin was attaching to the page body didn’t have a src attribute. That’s normal, but IE6 produces an error in these cases. So we added a src by modifying the plugin… and all is now fine and well.
8 Comments
I, too, received the back button alert frequently. That said, I’m still receiving it today . . . so I am not so sure it’s fixed. Like Tim, I’m using the dev channel releases — so it very well may be a chrome bug of some sort.
@Allen,
Yes, I think it may very well be the because of the dev channel releases. Actually, that should have been the first question we asked here. Generally, we can’t fix bugs for non-stable releases because more often then not – once the stable release comes out, everything works fine.
Also, I’ve been meaning to write a post on this: it’s probably not the best idea to use Passpack on dev or super-beta releases. Because for each bug you actually see, there could be many more which have no obvious effect, but may be opening up security holes. Sorry to be a party pooper!
Interestingly, I just realized I get the back button alert at work as well — and I use the stable channel here.
Hi Allen. Alas, you’re right. I’ve set my main browser as Chrome for this week so that I can try and catch when this happens. So far it’s popped up twice for me, but not every time. If you notice any patterns, please let me know.
I just installed google chrome and got the back button alert very soon after logging into passpack. What an annoying bug :(
Hi Johannes.
Yes, we thought that we had solved it, but apparently only part way. We’re working on it. In the meantime I’ve set Chrome to my default browser… so I’m living with the alert too until we get it fixed (I believe in the eat your own dogfood approach).
We’ve made another update. Can you let me know if you’re still getting the alert?
The bug seems to be gone! Hooray!