Page reloading Diagnosis

page-reloading-diagnosis.md

Page Reloading Diagnosis

• Page reload url: https://miketaylr.com/misc/exercises/apple.html

Examination

• Watched the console for clues, but found the console constantly re-loading and nearly useless
• First gut feeling this has something to do with window.location
• Grabbed all uglified JS files and beuatified them
• Searched each file for location
• A line in ac-globalfooter.js jumps out at me: window.location.replace('');
• Calling window.location.replace('') in another web page console just throws. I still think it is the problem
• I re-construct all JS (beautified) and HTML (not CSS) on my own server: https://dev.nulltxt.se/web-compat
• I comment out each JS file one at a time to reduce the test case
• ac-globalfooter.js is the culptrit
• The line with window.location.replace('') is the problem.

Conclusion

• Since window.content is undefined in Chrome/Webkit, the location.replace('') line is never called there
• I found a few bugs on bugzilla that were similar to this, but nuanced history issues
• I also noticed that Firefox's usage of location.replace to get stuck on a certain URL: I changed the '' to https://mozilla.org and the page was stuck on the redirect even with a "shift-reload"
• I am still unsure of the underlying cause - perhaps another script does a correct call to location.replace() before this one is called and the caching issue is what we are seeing here?

Recommendation

• I want to understand why the empty location.replace('')is needed - perhaps not? If so the site owner should remove it.
• I would file a Gecko bug with the STR and examination data to see what bz, et al have to say