Firefox 3 and HTML Search
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