Flag showing as error icon or question mark

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nirax
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Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:05 pm

Flag showing as error icon or question mark

Post by nirax » Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:19 pm

Hi I just installed falgfox 3.3. I first installed flagfox about 3 months back. It worked fine till about 3 weeks back when it only showed a question mark. The middle click button worked as usual. In general i use a lot of extensions but this has been since i have started using firefox (some 4 years back). Even when flagfox worked correctly, I had a lot of extensions already installed and their is no major changes in that.

Now as the error reporting is changed in flagfox, I see a red-background-exclaimation in place of flag. This red sign comes 10 seconds after the page has loaded. for about:config page there is different error sign.

I also get a error message in my console :

Error: Flagfox error: DNS lookup fail with status=2152398878
Source File: chrome://flagfox/content/flagfox.js
Line: 416

One more error message with a different number :

Error: Flagfox error: DNS lookup fail with status=2147500036
Source File: chrome://flagfox/content/flagfox.js
Line: 416

I also get a lot of error message which says (i am not sure which extension it is referring to):

Error: [Exception... "'JavaScript component does not have a method named: "handleEvent"' when calling method: [nsIDOMEventListener::handleEvent]" nsresult: "0x80570030 (NS_ERROR_XPC_JSOBJECT_HAS_NO_FUNCTION_NAMED)" location: "<unknown>" data: no]

and some warning which says (i guess it is linked to flagfox) that "filter" in domaintools is not working.

I hope this message helps in improving flagfox.

Thanks,
Niraj

nirax
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:05 pm

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by nirax » Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:30 pm

Some specific icon displays --

Intranet sites are displayed as a small network connected machine.
Many .in sites display the red icon but some display question mark. Ditto for .com
Sometimes even new tabs display the red icon, which get changed to a blank tab icon after some time.

This site displays a red icon.

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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by DaveG » Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:35 pm

Wow, not even out of the sandbox yet and I'm getting new information. Nice. :)

Hmm... I had heard of a few people getting this. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of it now.

First of all, the "filter" warning is for Domain Tools' CSS. That's them, not us, and I suggest you just ignore that. Many sites may specify the same thing multiple times using different browser-specific CSS and the other browsers just ignore it. There's actually a Mozilla bug sitting on Bugzilla requesting that these things be not shown if they're known to be this, but I have no idea if that'll ever get implemented.

The "DNS lookup fail with status=2152398878" means Firefox did a DNS request and it was not found. I have no idea what the second status number is. The last one isn't thrown out by Flagfox, seeing as I put "Flagfox" in errors messages, however I know nothing beyond that. Not very enlightening. :roll:

For whatever reason, Firefox is returning an error status to Flagfox when it does its DNS request. This is... weird. Are you using a proxy of any kind? Any network changes recently?

This may be an extension conflict, as these things usually are. If you could just try disabling your other extensions to see if one of them is the cause, then enabling them one at a time until you find the culprit. (see bug reporting sticky point #5) This is a standard troubleshooting method and pretty much the only way to detect extension conflicts.

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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by DaveG » Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:44 pm

nirax wrote:Intranet sites are displayed as a small network connected machine.
Intranet sites don't get a DNS lookup and should always show with this icon.
nirax wrote:Many .in sites display the red icon but some display question mark.
If any site shows as a question mark (even after waiting) and not the error icon, then you should also get an error in the console saying why. Either "Flagfox warning: no host" or "Flagfox warning: IP not in database" should be in there. If not, then the DNS request just completely stalled and never even got that far.

Give the troubleshooting steps in my previous comment a try.
(you were online here at the time of my posting, so you may not have gotten an email notify for that)

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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by DaveG » Mon Sep 15, 2008 10:38 pm

nirax wrote:Error: Flagfox error: DNS lookup fail with status=2147500036
Figured this one out and it's not an error. This is the code for abort, which Flagfox does to any pending DNS requests before doing a new one. (only one flag at a time) So, if things stalled and you went somewhere else then Flagfox asks Firefox to abort the first attempt and start on the second. I hadn't noticed that the abort command sent an error status and now that I'm outputting those statuses I just need to ignore this one and not show an error message.

Edited to add:
Ok, for Flagfox 3.3.1 I've cleaned this to not show a message on abort and actually show the words "Unknown host" for 2152398878 (Components.results.NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST) so it'll be less cryptic for these common cases.

In any case, to do anything I'll need to know why Firefox says it's unknown.

nirax
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:05 pm

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by nirax » Tue Sep 16, 2008 11:11 am

Hi Dave,

Thanks for such a prompt response. We do have a proxy installation but it has been since more than 6 months. I do not trust the network authorities not to do any mischief with network settings (and they are inscrutable enough to sweetly deny having done anything even if they do - the credulous me found this the hard way once), but I do not think they would do anything new which may block DNS lookup by FlagFox. After all it was working just 3-4 weeks back.

I guess it may be the handiwork of some modification in an already installed extension. I use about 45 odd extensions and I am very cautious about installing new ones. So I do not think any new extension has caused FlagFox any irritation.

It will take immense will power to turn off extensions one by one and find the culprit.

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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by DaveG » Tue Sep 16, 2008 2:28 pm

nirax wrote:It will take immense will power to turn off extensions one by one and find the culprit.
Not as much as you think. See the Mozilla troubleshooting support page:
If you have a large number of extensions

If you have a large number of extensions installed then disabling them one by one may take a significant length of time. Disable one half of your extensions to see if the problem still exists:

* If it does, then you know the problem exists in the second half, so you disable half of the remaining enabled extensions, and test again.
* If it doesn't, then you know the problem exists in the first half, so you re-enable half of the extensions we just disabled and test again.

By recursively enabling or disabling extensions in this manner you can home in on a misbehaving extension quicker than disabling them one by one.
Oh, and you really should go through your extensions and uninstall the ones you never really use, at some point. One of the common pitfalls of Firefox users is to install every add-on they think looks interesting and then not realize that it slows down their browser. Even if they all worked perfectly (and they usually don't) the simple act of running lots of additional things will necessarily slow things down and increase the risk of conflicts. You probably have too many extensions installed, but that by itself shouldn't break Flagfox so that's just a general tip on my part.

nirax
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:05 pm

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by nirax » Tue Sep 16, 2008 4:33 pm

I appreciate your concerns. However I do not carry baggage of addons. I have disabled 10 addons out of 48 (which are infrequently used, but which i do not want to lose). most of the rest are very useful stuff like TabMix, AwesomeBar, many Dictionary tools, Better Gmail, Zotero, AdBlock, NoScript, FoxMarks, FoxyTunes, FlashGot, DTA, McAfee SiteAdvisor, FireUploader, FoxyProxy, Gspace, etc. Some are meant for enhancing looks as Showcase and CoolIris. And some for organizing things like OpenBook, Organize StatusBar, Keyword Manager, TagMarks, etc. It is difficult to eliminate more than a very few of the enabled addons and do web surfing efficiently. I am sure you will also have 80% of these addons and if not you will want to have them after trying. Actually I am quite aggressive in reducing unneeded addons.

But I made a clean slate profile and installed FlagFox on it. The problem persists. This time there is no error message though. In my usual profile error messages are as conveyed before.

Thanks,
Niraj

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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by DaveG » Tue Sep 16, 2008 4:42 pm

If it happens in a new profile, than it sounds like something with your system. Odd. Well, at least we're making progress.

You could also try disabling your plugins one at a time, as a few have been known to do weird things. (new profiles usually get all the plugins too) Do you have a firewall that might be doing something weird? If so, you could try with it off for a bit to see.

Oh, and this is all off-topic, but NoScript is a bad idea (AdBlock+ should be enough) and anything with McAfee in it is likely to be iffy. TabMix is one that I used to use but just couldn't stand to keep around due as it became bloated and the cause of a few slowdowns. I never got around to trying Coollris/Piclens because it doesn't support Linux, but it looks interesting.

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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by DaveG » Tue Sep 16, 2008 5:20 pm

Though, while your DNS is being screwed with I don't think a Firewall could do that, seeing as the DNS request is supposed to be done by Firefox and should only be hitting its cache. (a plugin sounds like a more likely possibility) If you have a proxy, what are your settings? If it's a SOCKS proxy with remote DNS and no local DNS then Flagfox can't work. Maybe your admins changed some auto-settings and dropped DNS? Not sure, but that would make sense.

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