MeFi Music navigation issue

February 13, 2012 10:45 PM

MeFi Music Problem?

MeFi music caused a seemingly unresolvable issue for me when I tried to go back a page. The standard "are you sure you want to navigate away" message came up, and refused to respond to anything. Firefox then refused to close for anything, including (by my audible clues) attempting to cease any hard rebooting a number of times.

I'm running the latest edition of Firefox on a new MacBook with OS/X-Lion. I used the nifty new mac-trick of two-button navigating between pages, and while I doubt that caused the problem, I felt like mentioning it.

Would have made this a simple mod-contact, but felt like this was esoteric enough to be worth crowdsourcing.

posted by Navelgazer to Bugs at 10:45 PM (8 comments total)

I decided to try to replicate this (OSX Lion, FF 10.0) and when I used the back-swipe, I got the "Are you sure you want to navigate away...". I confirmed. Then I got ANOTHER warning. And another. There must have been 20 warnings, one after another. Finally, it sent me back to the previous page. I didn't get any freezing or anything, but that is strange behavior. I don't get it when simply clicking on a link. The warning only appears once in that case.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 12:45 AM on February 14, 2012

Then I got ANOTHER warning. And another. There must have been 20 warnings, one after another.

Well, there you go! You're not listening enough, and MeFi Music KNOWS it!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 2:03 AM on February 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

So, to be clear, you on this page and then you try to go back to the previously viewed page and you're getting this error?

FWIW, I can't replicate the error using OSX 10.7.3 and Firefox 10.0.1.
posted by dfriedman at 2:25 AM on February 14, 2012

Steps to replicate my error (OSX 10.7.3, FF 10.0.1):

1. Go here
2. Start playing song.
3. two-finger swipe to go back
4. See warning "Are you sure..."
5. Confirm, see another warning..etc

Actually, I did it twice, and after many of these warnings I got a window like this: (error box). I can't click it away or interact with Firefox, but the music keeps playing. I also can't quit firefox from the dock, but force quitting works.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 3:46 AM on February 14, 2012

the MUSIC! it just doesn't STOP!
posted by kaibutsu at 7:51 AM on February 14, 2012

I also have FF 10.0.1 on OSX 10.7.3. I have an Apple Magic Mouse and I turned on "Swipe between pages"—I normally have it off. If I finger swipe to go back in Firefox, I also get multiple confirmations. Other browsers are working fine.

So it looks like the combination of swipe to change pages and Firefox are not playing nice together. The JavaScript function that brings up the dialog is called onbeforeunload and should only run once when the page changes. This feels like a bug in Firefox to me, but I don't know for sure.

I'm not sure there's anything we can do on our end. We could disable the warning for Firefox on Mac across the board. But the standard back button and standard keyboard page navigation work fine. There's no way for us detect a finger swipe back vs. a button/keyboard back.

I'll do some searching around and see if anyone else has run into this.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:26 AM on February 14, 2012

Here's a bit more info. If I set the Apple Magic Mouse to do a two-finger swipe instead of one-finger swipe, the problem goes away.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:40 AM on February 14, 2012

OK, so I just managed to replicate this by following Philosopher Dirtbike's steps above.

Not sure why I couldn't replicate it earlier...
posted by dfriedman at 9:09 AM on February 14, 2012