Thursday, February 5, 2009

My Notes 8.5 client is possessed!

So I installed the Notes 8.5 client on my laptop this week and for the most part, things have been working about the same as 8.0.2. But there was one really weird thing that happened yesterday.
After turning on the Address toolbar in the client, tab after tab after tab after tab after tab in Firefox started opening up. All of these websites just started appearing out of no where. Legit ones too. First thought of course was virus. These were all websites I have visited in the past, but not with Firefox, these were addresses that existed in the Address drop down in the Notes client and not in the history of Firefox. After I disabled the Address toolbar in Notes, things returned to normal. No more tabs.
I didn't open a PMR because, of course, there is no way to reproduce the weirdness, but I wanted to share the weirdness.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

OMG. the same thig happene dto me but with IE. So I am not insane. I'll enter anspr and link to this posting. If you have any additional data pls send to me- mraven@usibm.com

Anonymous said...

I got it too after an upgrade but I did an absolutely fresh install a couple of days ago and have been fine so far touch wood

I couldn't get it to be repeatable but it happened a lot. The web pages that opened up were weird, they were ones I had been to but IO have no idea where those links were stored

Anonymous said...

Is it the Eclipse client?

The one single reason we are not rolling out the R8x eclipse client is this kind of thing.

It's not reproducible at will but the client might as well be doing it at will.

What we are finding throughout the R8 code stream (eclipse) is that the screen jumps around.

This post on LDD describes it as a "twitch" -
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/5f27803bba85d8e285256bf10054620d/4b038271f7b192d28525748000514d20?OpenDocument

I reckon what the LDD post is describing is what we are seeing and I believe it has something to do with your issue. Changing screen resolution is making no difference.

When the screen 'twitches' (actually it's more of a full scale convulsion) focus is lost and 'jumps' to somewhere else. In your case I reckon it has gone to the address bar and scrolled through your history launching a browser session for each entry there.

I cannot believe no-one at IBM has seen this. At the same time there are few reports of it on LDD but maybe that's because the people posting there spend most of their day in the Admin or Designer clients and aren't experiencing it. We have it across the board with our pilot group and no-one likes it. I've even been in Sametime when it has happened and lost focus there while the client goes doolally.

It has to get fixed as a matter of priority. Everyone who encounters this has to holler and shout until it is fixed - anyone who does is NOT being disloyal to Notes or IBM.

Scott Marchione said...

I know why it happens.... if I tell you all can I get a cookie? Okay, never mind, I'll just tell you.

You'll notice that this will open the browser that you have configured as the default browser in Notes, and if you haven't changed the setting in the client to use the default OS browser, it will open all these websites in the default Notes browser. Most likely you'll notice that this will happen when you switch from another program back the the Notes client, for some reason, the cursor, or focus or what ever will be placed in the address bar, and when you use your scroll wheel on your mouse, all the sites listed will be scrolled through and all of them will be loaded. It happens to me when I'm trying to scroll to the bottom of my mail DB to see the newest email. I also thought it was a virus the first time it happened, but after it doing it a few times, I noticed that it was only opening sites that were in my Notes Address tool bar, and the last time it happened I noticed why. If Mary Beth and he team can find a way to have better control over where the focus is placed on the client, that would resolve it. A similar focus issue occurs when you are deleting email from the inbox folder, and for some reason if you try to delete mail too quickly, the focus jumps to you Day-At-A-Glance sidebar widget, and it tried to delete what ever meeting you have listed there, and even when you say "No do not delete" it still tries and will lock up your client. There was a fix released for this for 8.0.2, but apparently it didn't make it to the 8.5 release, because it will still happen.

Andy Donaldson said...

Thanks for all the feedback folks!
I've forwarded on the comments to Mary Beth so hopefully this will get resolved quickly. So far, that's the only focus issue I've seen in the Notes based client.

Anonymous said...

Its the eclipse client. When the Notes client is redrawing colums etc and I scroll wheel on my mouse whilst the re-draws take place, I get random IE windows open with legit website in my browsers cache. This was in the beta and now still around in the gold release.

J

Anonymous said...

@Scott - I'll go with what you have said; it seems to stack up.

However - and please note this IBM - even if my R8.5 client is sitting idle (I have two PC's on my desk - one runs Notes 8.5 and the other is the one I work with) my mail file loses focus and starts jumping around. I have only seen this in my mail database. The same applies to my colleagues on 8.0.2 and as they say, "You can't call that stable!".

Anonymous said...

Thanks for th details, folks, I have entered a bug report on this. If any of you are able to also open a PMR, doing so increases the "customer weight" and makes it more likely that the bug will get fixed sooner.
Mary Beth Raven

Anonymous said...

Hey folks,
I have just been notified that the bug report I entered was verified by QE and the developer has submitted a fix. I cannot guarantee when you'll get the fix-- either 8.0.3, or 8.5.1 or both-- but again, no guarantees. Just wanted to let you know that the developer has submitted a fix.
Mary Beth Raven