Firefox 3 and HTML Search

On 1/9/2009 11:59 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?

As Brian and Marc pointed out, this is a Firefox 3.0 bug.  As it turns 
out, it was repaired in November, but not approved for release in 3.0.5 
or 3.0.6 (due this month??).  I've been told it will make it into 3.0.7.

For more on this, see

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445004

Duncan Murdoch