Firefox’s Slashdot Rendering Bugs
If you use Firefox and visit Slashdot, especially as a logged in user, you may have noticed Firefox mess up the rendering on the home page and many inner pages. This is due to Bug #217527 and it seems it will not be fixed in Firefox 1.0 (but is scheduled to be fixed thereafter). I wish the Firefox devs would reconsider, it’s never a good idea to render one of your biggest booster sites badly.
That said, workarounds exist: hit Ctrl+ followed by Ctrl- to reset the display. Or download the latest Mozilla trunk builds. Or (gasp) use IE, it works great with Slashdot.
Update 9 Nov 2004: Hardgrok has a handy little hack extension that sort of fixes this problem, although /. pages opened in background tabs still get borked.
18 October 2004 3:18 pm
October 22nd, 2004 at 1:30 pm
I use IE to read Tamil websites because FFox doesn’t “get” the order of Tamil ligatures. I know, I should p’bly file a bug report. WHen I’m less lazy.
October 27th, 2004 at 12:43 pm
It’s been a while since I read Slashdot in the regular mode — I usually use the Slashdot-light mode, so don’t see any problems. And oh, /. has _tonnes_ of rendering bugs. IE’s renderer certainly kickas FF’s ass. Twice on Slashdot
November 2nd, 2004 at 11:06 am
Kingsley, neither does it render Hindi very well. I discovered that today browsing नà¥à¤•à¥à¤¤à¤¾ चीनी. Firefox would just not display headings like “देह पर टिकी संसà¥à¤•à¥ƒà¤¤à¤¿” right: the matras would just not combine.
November 9th, 2004 at 12:00 am
This Firefox extension fixes the Slashdot rendering bug.
And IE’s renderer definitely doesn’t “kick Firefox’s ass”, in fact IE is both pretty slow and quite buggy (box model hack, anybody?). I won’t speak to issues with particular Indian languages (since I don’t speak any of them) but those sound like legitimate bugs, since there probably aren’t enough people testing with some of these languages. If you don’t file bug reports though, it’ll never get fixed.
November 9th, 2004 at 1:27 pm
I agree, IE can be quite slow: check out bloggercon.org in IE and in Mozilla for an extreme example. However, I think for 1997-era HTML 3.2 (which sites like Slashdot use) IE blows past Mozilla.
Of course, I may be feeling this because I’ve been wincing every time Firefox screws up Slashdot (I do all my Slashdot reading on Firefox, the tabs are convenient).
About rendering problems for Indic languages, there are quite a few reported bugs, and given my (basic) knowledge of two Indian languages it seems most of the bugs have indeed been reported, at least for Hindi (that only leaves about 20 other Indic languages to debug).
More than testers, I believe there is a shortage of developers who can commit patches in for these.