[Rd] Firefox 3 and HTML Search

[Marc Schwartz]

on 01/09/2009 10:59 AM 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

Duncan,

It is covered in R-Admin:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html#Enabling-search-in-HTML-help


"There is a known issue with Firefox 3 (and 3.0.1). The links in the
results page may point to the wrong directory level. This is a bug in
the way Firefox is interpreting relative URLs, and can be circumvented
by opening the HTML search page (.../doc/html/SearchEngine.html)
directly rather than from .../doc/html/index.html as shown by help.start()."


and in ?help.start in the Note:

Note to users of Firefox 3: the search results have links that are
resolved incorrectly by that browser if starting from the normal HTML
index page. The workaround is to start with help.start(searchEngine = TRUE)


HTH,

Marc Schwartz