Category Archives: Bugs in the Wild

Bugs in the Wild, Testing

BOM – Byte Order Mark

Because we encountered another hidden encoding issue as part of test data, here are some information about BOM and why this might be interesting in general for everyone working with a computer beyond Excel and Word.

Before you educate yourself, here is the tool to own to see such a problem easily. Most of all editors hide that information and so you might scratch your head why some data is failing with strange error messages. Get xxd and you will see with other eyes:

The first marked bytes are the magic and now head over to the Wikipedia to read more about BOM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Bugs in the Wild, Testing

Tracking and Ad-Blocker Software

Summary in 64 words

Ad blockers are widely used tools these days. Users install this software to improve loading times of websites or to simply remove intrusive advertisement. But what does this mean for us as a testing company? We saw some sites break and are now including tests with enabled ad blockers. This helps our customers to see where problems might occur and to improve user experience.

Introduction

The amount of advertising increases and more and more users take this matter in their own hands and install ad blockers. Users also become privacy-conscious and do not want to expose their browsing behavior to an ever increasing number of companies. Facebook’s, Twitter’s, and Google’s ad or content pixels are on nearly every page nowadays. Adobe collects data as well with font services, Scene7, and Omniture. There are lots of big and small third parties that live on pages and are included as a service. We have seen websites with over 50 third party services on a single page of their web shop.

Continue reading Tracking and Ad-Blocker Software →

Bugs in the Wild

Funny Bugtracker Findings: Yo!

1 Comment

Title: When entering special characters in the zip code field a pop-up appears that says “yo!”

Type: Bug
Status: Open
Priority: High
Description: 1. enter special characters into the zip code field of the email signup widget
2. a pop-up appears that says yo! (what is this?!?!)
Attachments: yo!.tiff
Comments: John Doe added a comment:
Sorry. I let that slip through. It was just debug code confirming we got that far in submission.
Bugs in the Wild, XLT

XLT Script Developer and Firefox 16

There is an open regression in Mozilla Firefox 16 (Bug 799348) that can prevent the XLT Script Developer from working correctly. The extension might crash as a result. This mostly happens when you work with multiple tabs or windows. Mozilla does not plan to fix this defect with version 16. The next version 17 will fix it.

To continue working with Script Developer and Firefox you have to downgrade to version 15 and disable the auto-update functionality. Once Mozilla Firefox 17 is released, you can re-enable the auto-update and continue as usual.

Your favorite Firefox extension Firebug might also be affected by that defect.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Bugs in the Wild, Software Development

One digit version numbers only, please!

Just read about a nice small software problem at Opera. Their latest browser is version 10, but they couldn’t continue to use the version number in the user agent string, because some web sites try to identify the agent version and fail with 2 digit version numbers. Seems to be similar to the famous Y2K problem, but now it is a BVN problem – a browser version number problem.

“…It appears that a considerable amount of browser sniffing scripts are not quite ready for this change to double digits, as they detect only the first digit of the user agent string: in such a scenario, Opera 10 is interpreted as Opera 1. This results in sites mistakenly identifying Opera 10 as an unsupported browser, thereby breaking server, as well as client-side scripts…”

Read more at Dev.Opera.