Facebook login not working in IE8

Mike,
I just tried to login using IE8. The Login button properly worked and brought me to the normal JFBConnect Login/Register page. On the home page, before I clicked Login, I was getting the following Javascript error in IE. I don't always see it on the home page (or other pages) which may explain if the problem is intermittent. Facebook is very reliant on Javascript, and if there are errors on the page, it could be causing the issues you're seeing. The error was located in the bottom left with a little yellow

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; InfoPath.2; IPH 1.1.21.4019)
Timestamp: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 01:35:26 UTC

Message: 'this.el' is null or not an object
Line: 105
Char: 26
Code: 0
URI: www.medlink-uk.net/

Message: 'this.el' is null or not an object
Line: 106
Char: 26
Code: 0
URI: www.medlink-uk.net/

I'm seeing all the same behavior that you are though, after the first Login click, things start to work better with the menus. However, if I close my browser and start again, it's not just the first Login click that fixes things. On this 2nd attempt, I clicked the "Schools" link, and then went back to the homepage and things were fine again. So it seems like simply moving through the site fixes things.

I'm not seeing the Javascript error above in other browsers, and when I view the source, that line doesn't have anything like "this.el" on it. Since, when you view the HTML it re-fetches it from the server, it's likely that whatever's causing the error is not there anymore because (like above) we've gone to a new page.

I'm not sure what it is that's causing it, but do you have any tracking software, or things that would try to set a cookie or session variable for the user on their first visit? It seems like that's where to look, but it's not a Facebook thing from what we can tell.. the Javascript error that's causing the problem is simply causing Facebook to have problems.

Digging through the HTML on your site, I notice a few things that could be problematic:
1) Joomla loads Mootools, a Javascript library. It includes version 1.12. Your template also appears to be loading the older version 1.1 of it through the following line: /templates/at_tenota/at_menu/at_menu/mootools.v1.1.js
2) The at_menu in general appears to be setting cookies and doing other things that seem odd for a menu to be doing. This could be absolutely normal and fine, but also goes along with the above where I mention setting cookies or other 1-time session variables. The file that's doing this (though I don't know what/if anything is calling it):
templates/at_tenota/at_menu/at_menu/at.menu.js

You may want to try a different template (temporarily) to see if that fixes the issue.. which will help narrow things down. Then, from there, start disabling different modules, plugins, or template features to see if there's a difference. Also, you may want to contact your template provider to see if they have a version that doesn't include an older version of Mootools or, in general, has other bugfixes.

Really don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree with these suggestions, but hope they help you narrow down the possible conflict.

Thanks,
Alex

IE8 is stable, and frankly, so is IE6 for all that's spoken badly about it. The problem is that all IE browsers basically don't follow exact HTML standards. Microsoft implemented things 'close' to how they should be, but not always perfect. When they were dominant (in the IE3-6 days), that was fine.. everyone just built websites to work with IE. Nowadays, it causes problems because people build sites for all browsers. Microsoft is gradually fixing this, and becoming much more standards compliant as time goes on. IE7 is better than IE6, IE8 better than IE7, and IE9 is one of the best browsers out there right now.

Finally, to top it all off.. IE is one of the least forgiving browsers when things do go wrong. If you have a site with an opening div, but miss the closing div somewhere, Firefox and Chrome are good at guessing what the intent was and not hosing the page. IE isn't always that nice.

So, hopefully, that's a good background on what's up. Should you need anything else, don't hesitate to ask. While I don't think your problem is directly related to JFBConnect.. we want you to be happy with your website, use JFBConnect to it's fullest, and where we can help, we will.

Thanks,
Alex

Mike,
No need to try to bribe us or pay us more.. while we do like subscriptions, we don't base support on the length of a subscription or the promise of a review.. we just do support for our subscribers

As for IE, we definitely agree its something to test and target. Wasn't saying you shouldn't, just giving an explanation of why it's usually the harder browser.

Finally, for your issue, in all honesty, I'd recommend just renaming the mootools file on your server. It's a dirty way to 'fix' the problem, but will be much simpler than digging through code to find where the inclusion of that file is coming from and will let you know if that's the culprit of the problem quickly. Simply navigate to:
/templates/at_tenota/at_menu/at_menu/mootools.v1.1.js
and rename that file to "mootools.v1.1.old.js" or something. Even though the page will still try to load it, since it doesn't exist, nothing will happen. If that fixes things, great! Then, we can move onto removing that call altogether.

You can even try the same with the at.menu.js file above, but renaming that likely will break your expanding menus and other things. However, if everything else starts to work magically, it's a good indication that that's the problem.. which is really what we need.. a starting point!

Hope that helps. I don't think I need Super Admin credentials yet, but if we keep whiddling things down, I may ask for them

Alex

Yeah, please PM me the details, and I'll see what I can do. It won't be an exhaustive search and may end up breaking something to get JFBConnect to work, but I should hopefully be able to help you narrow down what's causing the conflict, and then we can decide what to do from there.

Thanks,
Alex

Mike,
Well, I don't have a bullet-proof solution for you, but I know the extension that's causing the conflict. It's the ARI Ext Menu. I'm not sure if the version you're using is old, and there is possibly an update, or if there's just a conflict between it and Facebook. However, when disabling it, IE looks fine, there's no Javascript error on the page, and JFBConnect looks to work fine as well.

I've left both instances of it enabled, just so you know.

We can try to look a little into it more, but I may not have an immediate answer for you. The ARI menu includes a Javascript library called Ext, which I'm not familiar with. The common Javascript libraries we've used before are Mootools (included in Joomla) and jQuery (used by many 3rd party extensions).

Hope this helps get you started with either finding an update, or possibly an alternative menu with comparable features.

Please let us know if there's anything else you need or we can help with,
Alex