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Ghostery 5.1.2
Firefox 27.0.1
MacOS X 10.9.2
Was browsing and noticed weird tracky behaviour on a web page. Clicked on my handy little Ghostery icon and it says "This page was not scanned".
Selected other tabs, and other windows. Nothing is being scanned.
Clicked the settings button, then "Options", and nothing happens.
Clicking on any of "Options", "Support", "Feedback", and "Share" do nothing but re-hide those four buttons.
From the Firefox menu, I choose "Tools" -> "Ghostery" -> "Manage Ghostery's Options..."
which opens a tab to this page:
resource://firefox-at-ghostery-dot-com/ghostery/data/options.html
... which displays nothing.
This is a catastrophic failure. Ghostery has stopped working, but makes no assertion that it isn't working. The little ghost icon sits there smiling on my Firefox toolbar. The only way I knew that it wasn't working is that I visited a web page where the tracking behaviour was obvious.
I tried disabling, uninstalling, and re-installing Ghostery. The only change I've noticed is that clicking on the Ghostery toolbar icon now brings up the tutorial every time.
So:
(a) any suggestions for a fix?
(b) any way to get the smiling ghost to turn into a frowning ghost when it's not scanning pages? In situations where the software fails completely, it would be nice to offer a subtle notice to the user.
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Hi AE. Is there anything in the error console related to Ghostery when you try opening the options page? Error console could be opened by going into Tools (alt+t)->Web Developer->Error console.Comment
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Eric P. Scott March 12, 2014 17:56If you don't see this, you may need to open about:config and set devtools.errorconsole.enabled to true.
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Eric: Thanks for the tip on enabling the error console. I would have figured it out eventually, but "eventually" is much longer than "helpful person who knows."
Felix: I get a smattering of warnings and errors from various web pages:
Warning: Unknown property '-moz-border-radius'. Declaration dropped.
or, when loading the Guardian.co.uk site:
Error: ReferenceError: s_account is not defined
Source File: http://static.guim.co.uk/static/3a21a6225712e7df59854c0749abc6cffcf00ef2/common/scripts/omniture-H.25.5.js
Line: 10
... but nothing that strikes me as relevant to Ghostery. What should I be looking for?-
Well, I'm not sure myself, but what I'd try is open Firefox, close all tabs except one, open the error console on all, and then open Ghostery options page (resource://firefox-at-ghostery-dot-com/ghostery/data/options.html) to see if any new messages appear there.
If it remains empty, you may repeat the above steps but with the newer browser console that may be opened with the same steps as originally, but you'll need to select Browser Console instead of Error Console -
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Felix:
Loading this URL:
resource://firefox-at-ghostery-dot-com/ghostery/data/options.html
... returns 15 Warnings and no Errors to the Error Console.
Nothing is jumping out at me, it's mostly warnings from the files apprise.css , tipTip.css , and options.css .
I can post all 15 warnings if you like.
The tab for that URL shows a Ghostery favicon but nothing is rendered in the page. It is blank.
There is HTML for the (empty) page. View Source shows a body with one empty div.
AE -
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Also...
Having the tutorial come up every time I click the Ghostery button on FireFox's toolbar seems like a very strong clue.
By what mechanism does Ghostery remember that the user has already dismissed the tutorial once? Either that's not getting saved after I select "Close Tutorial", or it's not getting read when I click on the Ghostery button.
Another thing I've noticed is that I haven't given credit to the Ghostery team for making a useful tool. Ghostery is a good thing, and I don't mind helping to find a fix for this.
AE -
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Now I'm really pissed off.
I just re-started Firefox for the I-don't-know-how-many-th time since this problem started (more than 2, less than 10), and Ghostery is now working.
I didn't change, adjust, or twiddle anything. There have been no updates to OS, Browser, or Ghostery (or any other extension or add-on).
I noticed it because, as tabs started to re-load, Ghostery's purple Alert Bubble popped up and listed all the things it wasn't blocking.
I was able to select Settings -> Options, and have that page load, and nothing was selected in the blocking lists. I re-selected (everything in each category), and Ghostery seems to be working normally again.
This is maddening. There is clearly a problem somewhere. Other people have posted with the same symptoms I've had. But, the symptoms having vanished, I don't know how to help find the problem.
It's working, so things could be worse, but I'd really like to know what happened.
AE-
Sorry for the frustration, we are looking into this issue tho.
I can provide some guesses that may be correct, but I'm not 100% sure whats going on.
In general, the behaviour you are describing is often caused by one of the following:
- permissions issue with the profile folder. Ghostery has to read and write its settings from something called simple-storage: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/A.... If permissions are invalid, Firefox/Addon SDK would fail somewhere.
- a cleaning service such as CCleaner (for windows) nukes simple-storage as part of the course which results in the same failure as above
The way to detect one of these issues was my next suggestion that I'll outline right now, but hopefully, you will not need it. Since simple-storage is a type of failure that would occur right at the start, we need to launch Firefox with console enabled. This is not the same console as the two I've described in the previous comments. To do this, you need to drop to terminal and launch firefox with console option like this:
firefox -console
Heres a knowledge base article: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_lin...
Once started, you need to monitor the console for anything from Ghostery and paste it here. -
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No apologies necessary. The phrase "pissed off" was more hyperbole than actual anger.
Software can be frustrating.
That it might be a permissions issue occurred to me. The symptoms imply that the app can't read or write it's own data. But it doesn't seem like that can be the whole story. If that was the only thing going on, then how could it spontaneously heal itself?
When the problem first cropped up, I checked the permissions in:
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/h5n7arqh.default/extensions/
... and everything looked normal.
I'm comfortable working from a *nix command line, but now that Ghostery is working I don't know what I'd learn. If this problem crops up again you can be sure I'll post here with anything I find.
I stand by my suggestion that there should be some sort of positive assertion when Ghostery is not working.
Thanks for the help Felix. Though we didn't fix anything, it's good to know that devs are paying attention.
AE -
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I'm going to add here what I found out:
- Ghostery isn't creating a folder in the user profile. I tried moving the folder and uninstall/reinstall and I tried a new profile. In both cases, no folder for Ghostery was created.
- Ghostery isn't being listed in the active apps in Firefox's troubleshooter
- Ghostery isn't even being detected as being installed, neither on the Firefox page or on your page.
- Any kind of link, be it options, walk-through or help either don't open at all or if they open, they're completely blank. I tried opening them directly from the resource folder and they're still blank.
I've reinstalled it I don't know how many times already, it's simply not working. It's as if it's missing files.
It was working fine until this last update so don't give me "firefox permissions" bla bla bla. There's something wrong with the app itself.- view 1 more comment
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Actually I went on to find this out when Ghostery stopped scanning after the new update...
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Well, what you are describing is a symptom that may or may not be related to this topic, thats why I separated them.
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CHAMP
