[Rd] Firefox 3 and HTML Search

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Hmm, from NEWS

     o   help.search() has new argument 'searchEngine' to go
         directly to the search form: this is needed by users of
         Firefox 3 to workaround a bug in interpreting the search
         results pages.

and CHANGES (2.7.2)

     o   Rgui has a new menu item 'Html search page' on the Help menu,
         which goes directly to the HTML search form.  This is needed
         by users of Firefox 3, which generates incorrect links in
         search results when the page is accessed via the 'Html help'
         menu item (or via help.start()).

It is a Firefox bug, documented in the R-admin manual.


On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> 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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>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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