LastPass: a Business killer app!
Are you running a SaaS? is your app built with Polymer or using Web components? If the answer is yes, then be careful, LastPass may be your worst enemy.
You probably already heard about LastPass: a password manager embedded as a browser extension, don’t you? This extension is used by millions of users worldwide.
What’s the problem? LastPass has a bug that prevents Polymer pages to load. In other words, if your users see a blank page with bleeding red Javascript errors in the console, then it’s “normal” or not…
TypeError: this._meta.byKey is not a function
We noticed this issue when our customers started to report troubles with our pages on Firefox. Upon loading on Firefox with LastPass enabled, the pages were blank. Once disabled, everything was working.
That’s the kind of errors that make you crazy, especially if you have launched recently. You tested your product on multiple browsers and platforms but not with extensions…
Our first reflex was to look for a quick fix. We are end of January, we fall on Github posts from last October and November reporting a similar problem:
- https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/issues/448
- https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/issues/698
Issues are not resolved. We decide to contact LastPass support with reproduction steps. Here is the summary:
Day 1: We Received Your Support Ticket!
Day 3: We Responded To Your Support Request!
I am able to reproduce this on my end and have forwarded this information to the product team for review/resolution… Our apologies for the inconvenience caused.
Day 7: Reminder: Your LastPass Support Ticket
The reminder asks for an answer.
Day 9: Your Support Ticket Has Been Closed!
Great! Let’s give a try. No progress, the bug is still present… The ticket is closed. The issue is not fixed. After reading carefully the ticket page:
Our ticketing system can automatically close tickets, but that’s because our ticketing system is not designed with situations such as this in mind.
Really? What a crappy experience.
Hopefully, the Polymer team is coordinating a fix with LastPass:
- https://github.com/webcomponents/custom-elements/issues/137
- https://github.com/webcomponents/custom-elements/pull/138
All that to say that nowadays extensions are common. Depending on your target, testing your Web apps with popular extensions is becoming as important as testing your code under different browsers and platforms.
