blog @ pebbl

Yet again another problem I've come across recently in my travels. Implementing a YouTube Video uploader for work (via Zend/gData API) I found that the standard example form that YouTube/Google suggest for posting videos just failed to work entirely in Opera. Albeit, I was running this in a localhost environment on my MacBook (powered by MAMP) but out the of nearly 10+ different senarios I set up to test this problem, all failed (senarios that all worked on the other top browsers).

Opera did seem to action something when the submit button was pressed (the browser started loading), and I do have to admit I didn't actually test to see if the Videos where actually getting through to YouTube - but the most worrying thing about this problem is what happens next, after the browser has finished it's pretty loading animation...

. .. which is absolutely nothing! The screen just would not refresh to show the newly downloaded page. Instead the old page would remain.

To make matters even more confuddling I ran a test that involved changing the target of the form to open a new window. This did indeed open the new window, but the new page was entirely blank, and inspecting the Dom returned an error in Dragonfly stating something along the lines of "This window has no runtime".

Dragonfly also wouldn't track that a HTTP request had occured - subsequent clicks on the submit button would trigger HTTP calls that were tracked (and that return a succesful URL) but the page still would not refresh/redirect to the newly downloaded page. Very odd...

The only time I could get the form to actually properly post and redirect was when YouTube returned a failure code (400,500 ...) so this led me to believe that Opera has some problems when dealing with upload URLs that 302 redirect somewhere else - which is exacly what YouTube does.

I only had a short time to look in to this, and haven't tested on a live linux server set up yet (that should happen next week) but so far I could not find rhyme nor reason for this strange behaviour (even after extensive Googling). My only option so far has been to disable the video uploads specifically for Opera.