Firefox and Rendering Slashdot

I've been getting this error viewing various pages at Slashdot with Firefox on and off since about version 0.8.

slashdoterror.gif

Hitting refresh renders the page properly though. Is this an issue with Firefox or with Slashdot's ancient markup?

» posted by pinder on October 20, 2004 at 12:44 PM

Comments

It's a gecko bug I think. It has been fixed in the 1.8 branch, but I don't believe that they are going to roll this patch into Firefox for 1.0. Too risky.

# posted by Tim

Here ya go.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217527

Actually, the patch looks quite trivial, not sure why they don't go ahead and merge it. Oh well.

# posted by Tim

You don't have to reload - just change the font size up and down and it'll go back to normal.

# posted by painc

The fix for bug 217527 caused some large regressions. See:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217527#c80
That's one of them, but there were more.

# posted by Martijn

I have used firefox to read Slashdot since before version 0.8, and I have *yet* to see this issue that everyone keeps making such a hubbub about... does it only affect you if you change the font size, then?

# posted by John

I use mozilla at home, and I never see this behavior. At work (away from my 18,000 line HOSTS file of servers mapped to 0.0.0.0), I see it on occasion. I think it's triggered by the ads that slashdot runs.

# posted by Marty Vance

Well... I have not run any type of ad-blocking since around 9.0...

# posted by John

i thought it might have someting to do with the adblock extension on that page, but i tried it with adblock disabled and still get that error.

also, i went bugzilla.mozilla.org and entered "slashdot" in the search textbox and didn't find bug 217527 anywhere. so i just posted it here. but bugzilla usability issues could be an entirely new post all together.

# posted by pinder

If Gecko renders something inconsistently, Gecko is at fault, regardless of how ugly or non-compliant the input is. Barring stupid extensions etc., naturally.

# posted by MadMoose

WFM.

# posted by GURT

slashdot isnt the only site that gets rendering errors. it seems quite a few sites that use tables have the problem at times, although can be worked around with the remedies posted already. it doesnt happen all the time, but can be quite annoying.

# posted by pika unforgiven

This bug is caused by the fact that /. does not specify the dimensions of images in their HTML. The size of various table elements on /. 's site depend on the dimensions of these images.

What happens is that FireFox downloads the text of the page before it is able to download the images. Because it does not know the size of the images and thus the demensions of the table yet, FireFox displays the text without knowing exactly where it is supposed to go.

FireFox does not know exactly the size of the tables on the /. page until it actually downloads images and figures out the demensions of them. However, once FireFox gets this information, it "forgets" to go back and correct the text.

This is why changing the font size fixes the text layout. (FireFox already downloaded the images, so it is not missing any layout information when reformatting the text). Refreshing sometimes fixes the text layout, depending on if it displays text before getting the image dimensions or not.

# posted by Josh Smith

I haven't ever seen this.

WFM :-) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

# posted by Mithgol the Webmaster

I've been seeing this for several weeks at least, at two different computers. Right now I'm on

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041012 Firefox/0.10

# posted by jcurbo

I was getting this error, and though it's not really a true fix, I decided to flick over to the /. trimmed down HTML version, which also reduces bandwidth used.
To be honest, /. should have updated their layout years ago. It's not 1996 anymore.

# posted by Yorrike

This bug also affects the front page at http://www.animefringe.com/ . You need to reload for it to sort itself out.

Hope it gets fixed sooner than later...

# posted by sdkaneda

I have not run any type of ad-blocking since around 8.0...


Cheers,
Lenny

# posted by Lenny Cooper

May be related, deals with no height/width on img tag ...


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242159

# posted by Fused

So why have I *never* seen this bug in any version of the Mozilla Suite?

Am I the only one that thinks that Firefox, any version, is a fairly severe downgrade?

# posted by Ian

Yes, you are.

# posted by Mike

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