FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Encounters with the post-transition web site: Tips to boost survival odds
Old May 26, 2011 | 12:04 am
  #7  
ftnoob
Moderator, Southwest Airlines and Choice Privileges
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15 Years on Site
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Central Texas
Posts: 3,112
As annoying as the ad carousel is (for its distraction and interference with the purpose of the page), equally annoying (for general usability reasons) is the recent breakage of the modify search city input fields on the search results page. I am seriously sick of entering lax[tab], for example, and seeing that the _displayed input field does not expand to "Los Angeles, CA - LAX," then rolling the dice and losing (by getting back a copy of my original search results, instead of the results for the modified search). The breakage is because, with the recent changes, the _displayed input fields do not expand your input/copy your input to the hidden *Airport fields unless you have first used the mouse to click on the flyout trigger icon.

Rather than again wasting my time debugging SWA's code for free only to see the bug hang around for 1.5+ years, Beta v0.1 of the Zapper/Teaser GM script toggles the displayed input fields: instead of seeing SWA's crappy implementation of smart input fields, you will see (tweaked) versions of the old style select box input fields (which happen to be the only city input fields actually processed by the server). The "tweak" is not the work of the script; one good thing SWA finally did with the recent changes was to make those input fields display as single line select boxes, rather than five-line select boxes. (That is similar to a change I had kludged with user css long ago, before I knew any JavaScript.)

The script also turns off the upsell messages, though this feature might not be 100% reliable due to various interactions among GreaseMonkey, jQuery, and JSC. (JSC is the delayed JavaScript feature that allows a page to appear to be fully loaded/ready for use long before even a quad-core machine running a super-fast JS engine has finished executing the horribly bloated code that SWA foists upon you)
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