Friday, August 17, 2012

Failed to synchronize subtitles...

Thanks to comments from users, we've found a bug in the synchronization page that prevented users from synchronizing subtitles when using Internet Explorer. This caused a lot of frustration for our Internet Explorer users, and we're very sorry for this.

The bug has been fixed, and Internet Explorer users can continue using http://yt-subs.appspot.com as expected.

Based on Google Analytics, around 12% of the people who add subtitles on the site, use Internet Explorer. That's not a low number, but at least it's lower than the average usage of Internet Explorer on the internet. Here are the statistics from Google Analytics:



The rest of the post contains somewhat technical information on what was the bug.

The bug was actually quite simple: During development, we use JavaScript's console to trace / debug issues. Sadly, Internet Explorer doesn't support this, and before publishing a new version to the site, we have to make sure we remove calls on the console object, and we forgot one such call that caused a JavaScript error in the save flow of the Synchronization page.

We have some tests that use WebDriver to run end-to-end tests, but we didn't yet find a way to run these tests on Internet Explorer. Hmm, guess that's next on our plate.