PhantomJS JavaScript errors from gstatic, but not in browser - google-maps

Question

I recently ran our website through our PhantomJS testing suite and ran into JavaScript errors that I can't reproduce in my browser manually. These errors are found in the Google maps api and the text returned by Capybara is as follows:
TypeError: Unable to delete property.
TypeError: Unable to delete property.
at :215
at https://maps.gstatic.com/maps-api-v3/api/js/19/3/main.js:20 in cf
at https://maps.gstatic.com/maps-api-v3/api/js/19/3/main.js:20 in cf
at https://maps.gstatic.com/maps-api-v3/api/js/19/3/main.js:19
at :214
at https://maps.gstatic.com/maps-api-v3/api/js/19/3/main.js:20 in cf
at https://maps.gstatic.com/maps-api-v3/api/js/19/3/main.js:20 in cf
at https://maps.gstatic.com/maps-api-v3/api/js/19/3/main.js:21
at :176
at :31
at https://maps.gstatic.com/maps-api-v3/api/js/19/3/main.js:26 in Yf
at :178
Is this a known bug with Capybara, PhantomJS, or the Google maps API? Could the problem be caused by the user agent string in PhantomJS?

Answer 1

I'm using Cucumber / Poltergeist and I hacked around this in by creating the following extension:
/features/support/env.rb
Capybara::Poltergeist::Driver.new(app,
:extensions => ["features/support/ignore_gmaps_errors.js"]
)
/features/support/ignore_gmaps_errors.js
window.onerror = function(message) {
if (message == 'TypeError: Unable to delete property.') {
console.log('Ignoring gmaps error');
return false;
} else {
return true;
}
};

Answer 2

Google maps API experimental version was updated this morning (12/11) causing this breakage. By default when you include:
<script src="//maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?libraries=places"></script>
it uses the latest experimental version. Locking yourself to the latest release version:
<script src="//maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?v=3&libraries=places"></script>
should fix this.

Answer 3

Using the latest experimental version of Google Maps (v3.19), which includes a workaround, fixed this problem for me: https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=7475#c20
[Edit] Google Maps v3.19 was released as the production version on 17 Feb 2015. Also, PhantomJS version 2 was released on 23 Jan 2015 incorporating an updated WebKit module which doesn't exhibit the Unable to delete property problem.

Answer 4

Try setting the user agent to
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.41 Safari/535.1
Google delivers JavaScript that is not entirely runnable with its default user agent. PhantomJS 1.x is based on a really old fork of QtWebKit which is comparable to Chrome 13 (the reason for that user agent string).
It looks like you can do this this way:
#session = Capybara::Session.new(:poltergeist)
#session.driver.headers = { 'User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.41 Safari/535.1' }