IBM Rational Team Concert Project Plans not displaying correctly on Firefox 7
Rational Team Concert (RTC) is a project management tool from IBM. Since installing Firefox V7.0 on 9/27/11, several columns of data are completely or partially displaying blank. If I go back to Internet Explorer the data appears properly (but IE is too slow to use). Also my peers who are still using Firefox 6.0.2 are not having any problems. I have restarted Firefox 7 without add-ons and also restarted with a new profile as suggested in V7.0 troubleshooting tips but have the same results
RTC is licensed from IBM but runs on a local server.
Modified by bikerkuhn
All Replies (4)
I think RTC only officially supports Firefox 3.6, but I may have found the wrong system requirements page... here are some random thoughts.
(1)
Do you know whether RTC uses anything other than ordinary HTML/CSS/JavaScript to construct pages, such as a Java applet or an add-on? You can check for any blocked add-ons here:
orange Firefox button or Tools menu > Add-ons
On the left click Extensions, then scroll through the active ones down to any grayed-out ones.
(2)
Are the blank columns usually filled in dynamically after the page loads (i.e., using AJAX techniques)?
You could check for script errors. These don't usually allow you to solve the problem for yourself, but might give rise to some ideas for workarounds.
To open Firefox's error console, press Ctrl+Shift+j and click the Clear button. Then reload the page and check for errors (you can use the Error button to filter out all the other noise, such as style warnings). Anything notable?
(3)
To see whether this problem is caused by the HTML5 parser, you can turn that off. Please save any unfinished work first.
(i) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(ii) In the filter box, type or paste html5 and pause while the list is filtered
(iii) Double-click html5.parser.enable to toggle it to false (it should turn bold).
Then return to the problem page and reload. Does that make any difference?
Thank you for your suggestions. You are correct that officially IBM only support Fikrefox V3.6 but I was not having issues with V6.0.2. Regarding your three suggestions, here are my results from trying them.
1) I do not know if RTC uses anything other than ordinary HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Here are the disabled Add-ons from the Add-ons Extensions page.
- JavaConsole 6.0.26 - Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0.
2) I do not know if the blank columns are usually filled dynamically after the page loads. I went to the Firefox Error Console and found the four "No element found" error messages referring to the following URLs.
Error: no element found Source File: https://ct-jazz.clients.am.health.ge.com:9443/ccm/_theming/resource/html/aboveBanner.html Line: 1 Error: no element found Source File: https://ct-jazz.clients.am.health.ge.com:9443/ccm/_theming/resource/html/footerLeft.html Line: 1 Error: no element found Source File: https://ct-jazz.clients.am.health.ge.com:9443/ccm/_theming/resource/html/footerCenter.html Line: 1 Error: no element found Source File: https://ct-jazz.clients.am.health.ge.com:9443/ccm/_theming/resource/html/footerRight.html Line: 1
3) Toggling html5.parser.enable to False had no impact on the problem.
I know you advised not going back to V6.0.2 but that version works with RTC & I need to get it working again. If you can offer any other suggestions, I am willing to try them.
Thank you for the research. Those error messages are a little too vague to point to a specific issue.
You could run a portable version of Firefox 6.0.2 on the side for RTC and keep your current installation for normal browsing. Portable Firefox doesn't interfere with your main profile.
Thank you for the suggestion. It sounded like a reasonable approach. So I installed Portable Firefox 6.0.2. Unfortunately I can not run Portable Firefox at the same time I am running Firefox 7. The portable version displays a message saying I need to stop all other Firefox instances before starting the portable version.
Also I have new information about the problem we have using RTC with V7. It seems that if the width of a field value is greater than the width of the field on the Firefox screen, V7 replaces the field value with "..." followed by spaces. If I expand the width of the RTC data column to be as wide as the longest data value in that column, then the entire column displays fine. This also explains why in some RTC columns some fields display and other don't. The ones that display are those having a data value narrower than the current display column width. Unfortunately it is not practical to expand all all RTC column widths to the maximum data value length. We have too many columns we need to display at on time in nearly all of our RTC plan views. Currently if we need to see the complete value of a field that is only partially display, we simply hover the cursor over that particular field. So with this additional information, do you have any other suggestions for making V7 usable with RTC?