There are currently two bugs that are affecting the effectiveness of custom page tabs created with an iframe application.
Facebook says they are being worked on and a number of people have commented on the bugs and voted them up so hopefully they will be resolved soon.
But, if you are starting to create custom tabs with iframes or are considering converting your existing tabs, you should be aware of them.
If you create an account in Facebook’s bug tracker, you can vote for a bug. The theory is that the more votes it has, the higher the priority will be to work on it. Please note that if you sign up for an account and vote on a bug, you will start receiving emails about the issue. There aren’t too many but you might not want to receive them. As with anything Facebook, you will have to opt-out by going to your email settings and Change My Preferences within the bug tracker.
The Bugs
- This bug was fixed on 3/1/11
The iframe is not visible when you are logged out of Facebook. – This means the iframe tab won’t show up in google searches and if you aren’t logged into Facebook, the tab is completely blank. This isn’t good. It’s listed as Bug 15166. - The iframe is not visible when logged in via https – Recently, it was recommended to log into Facebook securely via https. This is easily done under Account > Account Settings> Account Security. But, iframe custom tabs aren’t visible when logged in securely, just like when you aren’t logged into Facebook at all in the previous bug. Again, Facebook is looking into this. This is Bug 15200.
When I worked in tech support, sometimes I was required to go to development meetings where they went over all the bugs in the about to be released or newly released products. Big time bugs were called showstoppers. I’m not sure, but I think these would have been considered showstoppers. I can understand being hesitant to use an iframe tab until these are resolved. Hopefully they will be fixed before March 11th.
photo credit: amateur with luck
If Facebook can’t get these bugs fixed before March 11 they need to extend the deadline on the FBML app. Frankly I don’t understand why they only gave us a month to make the transition. Surely letting people continue to use the FBML app even while they were implementing iframes wouldn’t have been a problem for them.
Hi Hugh – Hopefully they will. Otherwise a lot of project are going to be put on hold. And a month is a ridiculously short amount of time.
My thoughts, too… thanks for the 411 Kim!
Facebook said today that they are rolling out a “beta” on Sunday to correct the first bug. I’m not sure what that means – they will be testing a beta somewhere or they plan on breaking all of Facebook even more this weekend … ;-)
Any news on the fix yet?
The first bug 15166 has been fixed. The second 15200 is supposed to go into beta on Sunday and the fix will be live on Tues 3/8.
Hey Kim
Can you please tell me the latest on this bug? From what I’ve read you have to have an SSL certificate for the server the app is hosted on. Is that right?
Hi Nicky – I haven’t been following this but it looks that is the case. If a user is using https and the site the iframe is coming from doesn’t have a SSL certificate the tab won’t display. There’s a lot of info about it in the bug thread.
http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=15200