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New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

Last post 06-09-2008, 7:38 AM by seandr. 7 replies.
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  •  05-05-2008, 2:18 AM 1601

    New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    The previous generated launchpages worked fine with mozilla firefox after Sean helped me with the first one that was faulty. However the new version with the added java-installation option does not work at all. In fact i cannot even launch a sample script from www.milliscond.com from Mozilla firefox 1.5.0.1

    I hope these problems are only temporarily but we've been having extreme difficulties since the change from 2.x to 3.x. The other week about 10 out of 20 laptops (PC) with internet explorer  7.0 could not start webexperiments for various reasons. These did however use 3.0.1.1 so if you think these problems have been adressed please explain because the changelog only states that bugs have been fixed not the specific ones.

    These are the problems we've encountered:

    In some cases the application seemed to install but then it simply did not run. Nothing happend.

    In other cases the application was not allowed to be installed. (the user had adminstrator rights but it was still blocked)

    On some computers the application did launch, but crashed at the very beginning. In a few cases the whole computer crashed

    I suppose I could have solved most of these problems (not the crashes) by adjusting security options in Internet explorer. However at the time no person with computer knowledge was around. The point is that Inquist will not work with typical user settings on normal PCs. The whole point with web-based license (for us) is so that people can take the test at home or at work. If the web license only work in a laboratory then we would have been better off with the desktop version.

    What is happening right now is that our participants respond to us with angry emails explaining that they are very frustratated because of "worthless software that crashes their computers" (note that that's their expression not my own).

    Another small (but annoying) thing is that Internet explorer will block the javascript used to enter subject number. Altough this is not hard to bypass, for some very unexperience users this is too hard.



  •  05-05-2008, 8:45 AM 1606 in reply to 1601

    Re: New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    Ooof da. Sorry for the troubles.

    Regarding the Firefox issue, this may be due to a bug in the launch page that shows up if you have older versions of the plugin installed on your machine. I've just updated the fixed launch page - give it a try and let me know if it corrects the problem. Make sure you hit the refresh button in Firefox so you aren't just running the old page out of the cache.

    Is it possible some of your participants had a previous version of the control installed? If so, this could have caused a crash for those users if they were running Firefox.

    As for the IE problems, I'm still investigating. Note that Inquisit should install fine with the default IE settings. It's only if the users or their admin have changed them from the default that ClickOnce, ActiveX, and/or Java would be blocked.

    If you have any more detailed descriptions from your participants (e.g., browser type, windows version, exact result, etc), it would help if you sent them to me at inquisit at millisecond dot com.

    -Sean

  •  05-05-2008, 11:06 AM 1611 in reply to 1606

    Re: New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    Rickard,

    One other thing - are you hosting the launch page on your own server? If so, can you send me a point to it if it's accessible on the web (don't worry, I won't contribute any bogus data)? If it's not, can you email me the launch page?

    -Sean

  •  05-07-2008, 7:26 AM 1618 in reply to 1611

    Re: New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    No it is extremly unlikely that people had the control previously installed. We have recommended against Firefox at this point and the people who have not been able to do the test has been using Internet explorer.

    I have sent you an email with our launch page.

    As I think you'll understand the people who have the problems cannot easily communicate what settings they have or if the have IE 6.X or IE 7.X. 

    The biggest problems right now seems to be:

    a.) The script to enter usernames is blocked and people don't see a button below the adress field to override this. I cannot know if people don't see this because it does not exists or because they do not understand it.  Could this be due to other blockers such as various "firewalls" spyware destroyers etc. I don't know what types there are around because I never use them myself. However i often find that people have all kinds of stuff installed in their browsers: google toolbar, yahoo toolbar and lots of other stuff. Could something like that interfere and block it?

    b.) Many people enter the number and it seem as if everything is installed and then nothing happens. No errors no nothing.

    c.) Many people experience crashes when the script is launched. The experiment is launched all right, and i do get a data file with nothing in it since it crashes before the first trial. The first part of my experiment is a instruct element with a html page with instructions in it if this could be any hint as to why it crashes.

    Edit:

    I have now talked to several people and found out that the problem actually seem to occur before the popup box to enter subject id is shown. That is, people press start and nothing happens.  They won't even see that something is blocked. This happens in Internet Explorer and people do not report that they have any unusual settings. The solution seem to be to add the site (as well as millisecond.com) as a "secured location".

     

     

     

     

  •  05-08-2008, 9:09 PM 1623 in reply to 1618

    Re: New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    With respect to a), I believe there is a solution. IE allows you to popup a small browser window that could prompt for a subject number and then return it to the main page. As I understand, this isn't supported by Firefox, though. That may not be a problem, however, because Firefox doesn't make the basic input prompt as difficult to use as IE does.

    I'll put this on the list for the next update, which should be finished in the not too distant future. I have another improvement to the launch page planned - the page will expose a "having trouble starting the experiment?" section that will allow them to try one of the other launch technologies (ActiveX, Java, or ClickOnce) if the default isn't working. That should hopefully increase the hit rate a bit.

    I'll see if I can reproduce the crash with your launch page. Possibly this is being triggered by something in your script since I'm not aware of this being a generalized problem.

    -Sean

     

  •  05-30-2008, 8:29 AM 1656 in reply to 1623

    Re: New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    FYI - we've made the next release, 3.0.3.0, available as a beta. The launch page for this release uses pure DHTML to prompt participants to enter their subject codes, so there should be no more problems with Internet Explorer security blocking the prompt.

    You can use the beta by selecting it from the list of versions in the Web Script wizard.

    -Sean

  •  06-09-2008, 2:28 AM 1665 in reply to 1656

    Re: New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    This is a very nice feature. Thank you.

     

  •  06-09-2008, 7:38 AM 1667 in reply to 1665

    Re: New launch page (3.0.2.2) does not work at all with firefox + other problems

    You're quite welcome, and thanks for your feedback, which motivated these improvements.

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