Bug 12693 – Inspector doesn't work when JavaScript is disabled

• Component: Web Inspector (Deprecated)
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Elliott Sprehn]

If Javascript is disabled in the browser preferences and the Inspector is launched using the context menu the browser crashes.

Crash dump is attached.

Also it seems Webkit is reporting the image as /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari despite the fact that it exists at /Applications/Webkit/Webkit.app/Contents/MacOS/Webkit

Reproducible in the latest nightly build. (Thu Feb 8 6:10:29 GMT 2007)

[Elliott Sprehn]

Created attachment 13049 [details]
Crash Log

[Matt Lilek]

Confirmed, we should definitely handle this more gracefully.

[David Kilzer (:ddkilzer)]

Reproducible crashers are P1.  This probably also needs a Radar bug.

[Maciej Stachowiak]

We probably want to make the inspector window ignore the JS preference setting.

[Maciej Stachowiak]

<rdar://problem/4990045>

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

(In reply to comment #4)
> We probably want to make the inspector window ignore the JS preference setting.

We already do - the crash happens because the inspector wants to access nodes in the actual document, and they cannot be wrapped in JS objects if JS is disabled in it.

[Matt Lilek]

Created attachment 13170 [details]
Attempted patch

Prompt the user to enable JS if it's disabled, otherwise bail.

[Darin Adler]

Comment on attachment 13170 [details]
Attempted patch

This doesn't look like the right solution to me. Can't the web inspector use JavaScript even if it's turned off for the web page itself?

[Darin Adler]

(In reply to comment #6)
> We already do - the crash happens because the inspector wants to access nodes
> in the actual document, and they cannot be wrapped in JS objects if JS is
> disabled in it.

I think we should fix that.

[Darin Adler]

Comment on attachment 13170 [details]
Attempted patch

This is not the right fix. We should not be enabling JavaScript and overriding what the application is doing, even for the web inspector. Instead we need to fix the logic so that the inspector will successfully get JavaScript wrappers even though JavaScript is off for the target WebView.

[Matt Lilek]

*** Bug 12958 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Timothy Hatcher]

*** Bug 14286 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Oliver Hunt]

<rdar://problem/4618350>

*** Bug 16203 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Glan Thomas]

I guess a quick solution might be disable/gray-out the web inspector if javascript is disabled or prompt the user that javascript must be enabled to use the web inspector.

They are not perfect, but avoid causing a crash. In any case the inspector is ont quite as useful without javascript enabled, as page DOM wouldn't have changed so the source structure would be the same.

[Matt Lilek]

*** Bug 17348 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Adam Roben (:aroben)]

The Inspector no longer crashes when JavaScript is disabled. It now opens in an unusable state.

[Timothy Hatcher]

*** Bug 21640 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matthew Hutton]

It should at least display a warning when you try and run the inspector with Javascript disabled - I wasted a fair bit of time thinking it was completely broken because I'd forgotten I'd disabled Javascript in Safari (for web development too :p).

[Alexei Masterov]

Inspector should fail gracefully, displaying a correct error message to the user, rather than crash the browser

[Blaze Burg]

In recent versions of inspector, there is no crash and the inspector still works correctly. It may be a good idea to disable the Debugger sidebar panel when the page's JavaScript is disabled, but that's a separate bug.