More broken.

February 25, 2006 2:39 PM

Matt. More broken.

I logged in from another machine - OSX 3.9, safari 1.3.2
I get that goofy code that I have to type...and it doesn't redirect correctly. You'll see it when you logout and back in.
posted by filmgeek to Bugs at 2:39 PM (6 comments total)

I've experienced this also, but still get logged in.
posted by puke & cry at 2:58 PM on February 25, 2006

This works for me in Safari 2.0, what exactly is happening?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:21 PM on February 25, 2006

I get logged back in..but the redirect is screwed up.

Hmm. Not in Firefox - only when I was in safari 1.3.2. The error was a screwed up redirect with the URL parsing wrong.

I'm back on my machine on Safari 2 (as well as a logout/in with FF 1.5.0.1 with no ill effects.)

I was logged in, but the redirect was screwy. I tried it both from a main page as well as a thread - and it's working fine.

I think it has to do with the way the Metafilter redirect interacts with safari 1.3

Probably not a huge issue..but yeah, something is screwy.
posted by filmgeek at 6:43 PM on February 25, 2006

I logged out and then recorded the HTTP traffic exchanged with the MetaFilter server when I logged in. After a user enters their name/password/captcha, their browser submits a POST to the server. The server is currently responding with an "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" status result and a "Refresh: 0; URL=http://www.metafilter.com/" header field. The Refresh HTTP header is a completely non-standard header that does not appear in either the HTTP 1.0 or HTTP 1.1 specifications, although it appears to be widely supported by browsers. It's just speculation on my part, but I suspect the problem comes from the fact that early versions of Safari did not honor this non-standard header. I don't have a copy of Safari 1.3.2 handy, so I can't confirm this.

I believe the server should respond to the POST with an "HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily" status result and a "Location: http://www.metafilter.com/" header field (technically the 303 status result is the correct code to return following a POST, but many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 303 status result).

So, I don't think this is technically a bug in Safari, I think it's a bug in MetaFilter. Perhaps Matt can modify Metafiter to use a standard redirect instead of a refresh.
posted by RichardP at 10:58 PM on February 25, 2006

Yeah, um. What he said.
posted by filmgeek at 4:27 AM on February 26, 2006

I'll see what I can do. I do that weird hack redirect because of a long-standing bug in CF where cookie values can't be set on full standard redirects. Someone figured out that hack to let the server set cookies, then redirect that worked in browsers (at the time).
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:55 PM on February 26, 2006