InformAction Forums

Alan Baxter wrote:

Jojo999 wrote:But again, everything works fine in IE8.

IE8 does the same thing as Firefox for me, i.e. if I paste http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30 ... nted=print into my IE8 address bar, then it goes to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html instead of the print-friendly page.

OK, yes, same here. But what I meant was that the PRINT button worked in IE8 but not in FF. And this failure for FF just started happening in the last couple of days.

I tried going back to .79 and then .77 (now) but didn't get any change.

However, does going backwards like this clear out any new entries that NS might have put in Prefs or other places? I don't think so, so unsure if this test is valid.

Edit:
Did a file compare of an old user.js to the current one. No, prefs are not adjusted on aversion change backward. Of course. Should have realized that. D'oh.

OK, I have solved the problem. But I am not sure what was the root cause of these issues.

Going back to .77 did not make any difference. I returned to .81

So next I tried copying in profile backup files from last Sunday (oldest I had). After doing this, the problems disappeared. So I suspect something in the prefs.js file.

I had done a line by line file compare on the backup version and the current version of prefs.js and there were significant differences.

But FF seems to be working normally right now.

Guess I was lucky to have a profile backup.

Alan Baxter wrote:

Jojo999 wrote:But again, everything works fine in IE8.

IE8 does the same thing as Firefox for me, i.e. if I paste http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30 ... nted=print into my IE8 address bar, then it goes to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html instead of the print-friendly page.

If you paste the "?pagewanted=print" in the address bar, you're not sending any referrer.
It's clear that NYT doesn't want the printer-friendly page to be directly linked from outside the web site, probably in order to avoid loosing some advertising bucks when the article gets slashdotted or the like.

Giorgio Maone wrote:If you paste the "?pagewanted=print" in the address bar, you're not sending any referrer.
It's clear that NYT doesn't want the printer-friendly page to be directly linked from outside the web site, probably in order to avoid loosing some advertising bucks when the article gets slashdotted or the like.

That's what I thought all along too, and I was confirming that IE8 does the same thing as Firefox, as expected. I didn't understand what Jojo999 meant by "everything works fine in IE8", but Jojo999 subsequently clarified that. I'm glad using a backup profile was sufficient to fix the problem.

Giorgio Maone wrote:

Alan Baxter wrote:

Jojo999 wrote:But again, everything works fine in IE8.

IE8 does the same thing as Firefox for me, i.e. if I paste http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30 ... nted=print into my IE8 address bar, then it goes to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html instead of the print-friendly page.

If you paste the "?pagewanted=print" in the address bar, you're not sending any referrer.
It's clear that NYT doesn't want the printer-friendly page to be directly linked from outside the web site, probably in order to avoid loosing some advertising bucks when the article gets slashdotted or the like.

Maybe not. This direct print link works for me, both by clicking it in a Windows clipboard extender and by pasting into the address bar:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opini ... nted=print

Maybe the "no print" is only blocked for certain sections of the paper? But that would seem to me to be pretty sophisticated programming for a newspaper....