Unable to Change the Home Page in FireFox

 

Summary

A successful new install of Mozilla FireFox in Mandrake Linux leaves the home page set as being a blank page in the Preferences menu. If the user attempts to change the home page from being blank to being a page on the Internet, FireFox will not accept the input and disallows the user from clicking 'OK'. The user must hit 'Cancel' to return to the browser from the Preferences menu.

Application Description

Mozilla's FireFox is an Internet browser available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. At the time of writing this presentation, FireFox was still pre-1.0 (meaning that it was still a preview release for testing purposes).

Test Design

This example demonstrates the use of Function testing. In Function testing, we evaluate the application by locating and isolating functions, then interacting with the functions and observing how well each can perform its task.

In this presentation we are testing the Preferences function by changing the setting of the home page. The home page is the page that the browser opens as it is launched. Preferences should be easy to alter, undestandable, and, most importantly, retained between sessions. When we change our homepage, we expect that it should be easy to do and saved. It should also have no adverse affects on any other component of the browser.

We expect that we should be able to change the home page and return to browsing, and that the next time we launch the application, it will load our home page automatically.

Function testing is a powerful technique in that it helps us focus on what we expect a function to do and how well the function performed in fulfilling our expectation.

Performing the Test

  1. Open Mozilla FireFox:

  2. On the top horizontal menu, click on Edit->Preferences.

  3. Under the 'General' properties, type http://www.yahoo.com into the Location(s): text box for the Home Page:

  4. Click 'OK'. The window will not close.
  5. Remove what you typed into the Location(s): text box and then try to click 'OK' again.

  6. Again, the window will not close. Press 'Cancel' to leave the Preferences menu.
  7. To verify that the error was with the Home Page, on the top horizontal menu, click on Edit->Preferences again.
  8. Press 'OK' without typing anything into the Location(s): text box for the Home Page. The window should now close correctly.

Results/Relevance

If we did not change the home page, we were able to successfully close the Prefences menu. In fact, with some more exploring, we find that we are able to make changes to other options in the Preferences menu, we just were not allowed to make changes to the Home Page Location setting. In fact, even if we made a change to the Home Page Location, and then removed our change and tried to leave it blank, we were still unable to successfully close the Preferences menu without having to press 'Cancel' (effectively undoing any other changes to our preferences that we may have made).

This bug is not critical in that it will not corrupt data or cause the computer harm, but it presents a large barrier to ease of use. Changing the home page is one of the first changes most users will make with their Internet browser, and many users will continue to change their home pages on a periodic basis. In other words, this function is used extensively, and is very important to the overall experience of using FireFox. If a user is unable to personalize the application, especially an Internet browser, it is unlikely that they will continue to use it.

By implementing Function testing, we were able to isolate and evaluate the performance of the Home Page function. We found that it did not perform correctly and that it needed to be able to accept changes to the home page location.

Similar Tests/Additional Notes

Since Mozilla's FireFox is still in testing stages, it is a perfect application for practicing testing techniques. Function testing in FireFox is especially rich, and will help give valuable experience. Try testing FireFox by evaluating each function and how well it works.

Configuration Notes

Testing Mozilla's FireFox v0.9 on:

Created 15 June 2004 for the CSTER

All images and written material ©Copyright Sam Oswald 2004

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