Opera hanging on page load on your site? Check for missing files.
I recently discovered an issue with the mailing list signup on the Fwd:Vault placeholder site. [Aside: It was perfect when I set it up, I swear there are gremlins in my code sometimes. If you tried to sign up and were unable to, I apologize, try it one more time.] After fixing the issue, I naturally tested it in every browser, and Opera was simply hanging at the page load. The page would visually come up fully, but the Javascript effects wouldn’t fire, making the signup form unresponsive.
To start figuring it out, I enabled the Progress Bar to check out when/where the problem occurred. The bar contains a bunch of useful stats while the page is loading. To see the bar yourself:
Shift-F12 > "Toolbars" tab > choose "Pop-up at bottom" from dropdown.
Here’s a screenshot of the menu:
Then I refreshed the pageload and saw this…
Note the “Elements” load is off by one, yet the request is listed as “completed.” Keep in mind that the browser is still acting like it’s loading at this point: hourglass cursor, and I couldn’t interact with the page. To make matters worse, you can’t click through to see any further details on any of these stats, which is really dumb since this summary information is coming from somewhere.
Opera’s Developer Tools, Error Console, and Java Console interfaces showed nothing. I probed the rest of Opera’s menu’s and output options, and couldn’t find anything to support remedying the situation. I could be wrong of course, so if you have more Opera experience, please let me know where to look.
Instead, I used Firebug to discover a missing Javascript file, as the title suggests. I had a standard <script src=[...]></script> block, but the target file wasn’t in place. Now every other browser had handled this situation just fine, they timed out on the missing file and moved on. Opera is apparently more insistent, which wouldn’t be a problem if they provided the information necessary to diagnose the situation or manually override the hanging pageload.
This behavior is simply idiotic planning on Opera’s part: end users see a finished page that doesn’t allow interaction, and webmasters get zero clue to the cause of the hangup.
Expounding, this seeming lack of user focus likely contributes to Opera’s weak market position. With all the free choices out there, they have to be the most appealing in one or more categories to one or more demographics, and I never saw anything Opera that differentiated it significantly from the pack. That seems like a “Business 101″ observation to me, but they certainly aren’t the first netcom to come along without a clearly defined path to market and profit.
Document collaboration
Hi, I’m Hallvord and work for Opera on JavaScript quality assurance and testing. Thanks for the blog post, what you’re describing sounds like a bug. Opera is meant to report missing script files in the error console – you should have seen a message saying “Warning: could not load http://www.example.com/script.js“. The page should never be non-interactive, and the loading indication should go away.
My guess is that it might be something about the page’s state at the point the missing script is meant to load that triggers the bug. For example, if the script is inserted through the DOM or fails to load during heavy DOM manipulation, or if there is some error with HTTP pipelining that makes Opera believe the script is in fact on its way. It’s however impossible to pinpoint the reason without seeing the actual failure, so if you could contact me and point me to the page you had problems with and tell me what script was missing – for example by filling out the form on bugs.opera.com/wizard and refer to your blog post – I’ll follow up and make sure this bug no longer is a stumbling stone on our way to markets and profit
I have the same problem, and here are the two sites i have the problem with.
http://www.footballsfuture.com/phpBB2/index.php
http://www.rotoworld.com/content/home_NFL.aspx
The thing is, sometimes it will work fine… but for about 15min every few hours, but then it will have this problem again.
It doesn’t happen on IE or anything like that as mentioned, and its very frustrating.
Thanks for the follow-up, Hallvord! Browser aside, responsive support to user complaints definitely separates Opera from the pack a bit.
I am in the process of putting together a page that replicates the problem I was having. Unfortunately I didn’t write down exactly which file was causing the issue, and am currently unable to reproduce the error. This leads me to believe that the script load order, in-file location (head vs. elsewhere), and/or caching may have something to do with the issue. Will post if I uncover the bug again.
In response to Tim’s comment above: right now the footballsfuture.com link works just fine here. The rotoworld.com one does however show a problem. It’s caused by some ad-script, and from some very superficial debugging the problem is that the script http://media.fastclick.net/w/get.media?sid=49081&m=6&tp=8&d=j&t=s gets added to the document over and over. The server seems to redirect back to the script that inserted it in the first place, so it gets inserted again. Right now it looks like a server error but I’ll try to verify that..
Frank: sorry to hear you couldn’t find the problem anymore, I thought it might be some elusive corner case issue. If you see it again do let me know.
I thought it might be some elusive corner case issue.
That’s definitely how I’d classify it. I double checked my browser version to ensure I didn’t update after the fact (I didn’t), so the problem is still there. I’ll spend some time next week trying to reproduce it.
If you see it again do let me know.
Will do.
Primarily it hangs on foxnews.com and cnn.com. I normally don’t go to others for news. I
cannot make it load videos either. Withe the same sites and computer (double booting),
IE works well. I’ve been chasing this for about 5 days now. Sure would appreciate some
ideas. Currently using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, fully updated. The problem may be in the site
because I did a validate with opera and it came back with about 300 errors for foxnews.com.
I didn’t check cnn.
Some time before, I needed to buy a car for my organization but I did not earn enough cash and could not order anything. Thank God my mother adviced to try to take the credit loans at banks. So, I acted so and was satisfied with my short term loan.
I know this is resurrecting a *very* old issue, but I’m still getting the same thing in Opera 11.51 (and a preview of 12.00) in September 2011.
The classic trigger to reproduce the hanging is loading a page with a google-analytics javascript element in it. My router redirects calls to http://www.google-analytics.com to 127.0.0.1, so it seems that Opera is waiting to find 127.0.0.1/ga.js before rendering the rest of the page. Viewing source, removing the GA script and Applying changes allows the page to load fine.
Interestingly, Dragonfly doesn’t show a body tag in the page details, just html and head. View source shows the whole page. I don’t know enough about Dragonfly to know whether that’s useful info or not.
Anyway, I thought I’d put this here in case anyone else Googling for the same problem stumbles across this page too.