[Rd] Firefox 3 and HTML Search

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Fri Jan 9 17:59:56 CET 2009


I finally upgraded to Firefox 3.05 from 2.x, and now I can reproduce a 
bug a colleague has been complaining about but which I hadn't been able 
to reproduce before.  In Windows, set Firefox as the default browser. 
Then in Rgui (seems to affect all versions up to R-devel), use the menu 
to open HTML Help, and choose "Search Engine and Keywords".

Enter a keyword (e.g. plot), and click on "Search".

Things are a lot slower than they used to be with Firefox 2, but 
eventually I get a result, starting out

Search Results
The search string was "plot"

base-defunct
     Defunct Functions in Base Package
expression
     Unevaluated Expressions


However, the current URL is not the same as it was before:  it is now 
listed as

file:///<RHOME>/doc/html/index.html

so the links don't work:  they are entered as 
"../../../library/base/html/base-defunct.html", etc. in the source, and 
the expect the current directory to be

file:///<RHOME>/doc/html/search/

If I set Internet Explorer as my default browser (yuck), things are 
fine, so this is a Firefox 3 bug, or a new Java bug, or an R bug that 
was masked before.

Any suggestions of workarounds?

Duncan Murdoch



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