Comments on: Hey Dreamhost, we use tabs now

By: Mossop

Mossop — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:59:20 +0000

Hah nice, I’ll look to see if there is a wordpress bug on file for it.

By: Ian Thomas (thelem)

Ian Thomas (thelem) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:12:16 +0000

Hmm. I’m not sure why the above came out as a reply to your message – I used the ‘post a comment’ link at the top right. Session issue perhaps?

By: Ian Thomas (thelem)

Ian Thomas (thelem) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:11:10 +0000

Hey Mossop, we use ‘open in new tab’ now

When I posted my message above, I tried to do so my middle clicking on the reply link to Lucy’s post. That just gave me a new tab with the exact same page in it. I figured it was a JavaScript problem, and sure enough if I disable JavaScript then I can’t post at all.

By: Ian Thomas (thelem)

Ian Thomas (thelem) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:05:31 +0000

I’d say it is a pretty common situation – if you have mulitple domains either with different tlds (most of the sites I’m involved with have both .co.uk and .com) or common misspellings. (yes, I know about CNAMEs, but people don’t always use them for whatever reason).

By: Mossop

Mossop — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:37:07 +0000

It’s true. I’ve developed web applications myself in the past and in complex scenarios coping with multiple windows is very difficult. The things is though that this doesn’t appear to be a complex scenario. You click edit and it displays the edit page, the domain to edit is in the url and displayed in the page. I’d expect that sending this domain in the data that is sent when you submit the form (which it doesn’t currently) is really all you’d need to at least do a sanity check and confirm it is the domain you are expecting.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:06:22 +0000

Yeah, that kind of thing is annoying – my bank’s internet site is similar, very sensitive to page requests happening out of order. Tends to log me out if I try to open multiple tabs, or even if I click on one link accidentally then click on the right one before the first loads.

That said, it’s not entirely surprising. Making a web site work with multiple tabs is easy enough, but doing the same for a complex application is quite a bit harder. It’s a problem not dissimilar to writing multi-threaded applications – an application designed for single-window use is easy to write, since you can assume that the series of HTTP requests you’re getting are supposed to be sequential, and can safely modify session state.

Opening multiple windows or tabs on the same session means requests are no longer sequential, and you need to start working out which requests belong to which sequence. And that’s not easy, because the browser doesn’t offer any help – there’s no way of telling which tab a request came from, short of to write some client-side logic that works out when it’s been opened in a new tab, and passes some new token with every request. Not impossible, but not trivial either.

By: Mossop

Mossop — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:12:40 +0000

Well whether it is normal to edit multiple domains at once is an argument for whether they should support that or not. I’d accept it isn’t a normal case (though I have done exactly that twice that I know of) and maybe it shouldn’t be supported. But it should give an error message or something, not clobber the settings you weren’t expecting.

By: Majken "Lucy" Connor

Majken "Lucy" Connor — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:57:16 +0000

The other thing to take into account is whether it’s the usual case to change the settings of more than one domain at once. What seems to me the most likely scenario is that you edited one domain in one tab, then a few tabs later edited another domain, left them both open, then later saw the old tab and just used it to change domain #1 again.

I agree though, the potential destructiveness should definitely outweigh how likely it is to happen.

By: Mossop

Mossop — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:42:30 +0000

It’s very true, but I’m pretty sure the rise of tabs has really increased the numbers of people using multiple pages at a time. We now get people with hundreds of tabs open, doubt anyone had hundreds of windows open.

They certainly do know about it, I told their support team a month ago. They said they’d talk to the developers and get back to me about it but like most claims of that sort nothing ever came of it.

By: Gaby

Gaby — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:32:14 +0000

There was always a chance of that being an issue prior to tabbed browsing too, as people could easily have opened settings for different domains in multiple windows. I’m surprised they haven’t updated it though. I suppose it’s possible they don’t know, but I’d have thought a lot of people would come across that. My host (Bluehost) seems to handle domains by ajax, although we hardly get an options for them.