Not Just Chrome, Dev Builds in General…

In the past, there have been issue with other beta release of browsers – Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari have all had thier day. Almost 100% of the time, the issues that arise in a dev build resolve themselves once the stable release is out.

We simply can’t modify Passpack to be compatible with nightly or dev builds. Besides being an impossible task, we hope you’ll agree that our energies are better spent working on new Passpack features and improvements.

A Thought on Security

I’m not going to go as far as to say that dev builds are not secure – that would be a sweeping statement. However I will say this:  The chances of there being bugs that potentially open security holes are higher when the browser … you know… hasn’t completely finished debugging.

So even if you have a dev build that works with Passpack, we’d like to invite you to only access your account with stable released browsers. I know, we’re paranoid, but that’s our job [smile].

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.