Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Discuss how to use and promote Web standards with the Mozilla Gecko engine.
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Trev10
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Joined: April 12th, 2011, 7:11 am

Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by Trev10 »

When I installed FF4 Three of my website pages were no longer displaying correctly. The affected pages always worked just fine in FF3. The affected pages continue to work fine in IE. The problems are as follows: First problem page
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/christine.hawkins1/index.htm there is a script that should activate a daily resume of what happened on any given day in the 1960's. The dispayed text should appear at the top of the page. In FF3 you will see the text. In FF4 it does not appear.

On the other two affected pages a new window should open from an internal link actived by a l/h mouse click.

The second problem page
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/christine.hawkins1/wytonremembered.htm
This page is fine until the link is clicked. The window new internal window will open but when it does it strobes, and cannot be closed.

The third problempage
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/christine.hawkins1/wytonretronewspaperheadlines.htm
Displays incorrectly and the internal pop up window behaves in the same way. That is to say it strobes.

What is it that has changed within FF4 to cause this? because the pages displayed and worked as intended in FF3.

One other piece of information that may be of interest. While FF4 was installed on my computer it caused Dreamweaver to mal function. If I attempted to use the "View in browser" facility it would not function and Dreamweaver threw up error messages. I have now reinstalled FF3 and when I view my problem pages using that everything is as it should be. Crucialy Dreamweaver now works properly with out any error messages. Can anyone please help me to resolve the issues that I have encountered with FF4?

My operating system is windows XP

Trev10
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dickvl
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by dickvl »

That looks like a problem with your JavaScript code and the HTML 5 parser in Firefox 4.
It work if I disable the HTML 5 parser.

See the Tools > Error Console:
Warning: An unbalanced tree was written using document.write() causing data from the network to be reparsed. For more information https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Optimi ... ve_Parsing
Source File: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/christine. ... /index.htm
Line: 1019


https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Optimi ... ve_Parsing
Trev10
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by Trev10 »

Thank you dickvl for your response. Is this a sign of progress that something which worked perfectly well before in FF3 no longer works when FF4 is installed? I would have thought that an upgrade would have improved performance rather than lessen it. Seems to be a curious thing to do. Does this also explain why FF4 trashed the functionality of Dreamweaver? If everything works fine in FF3 and not FF4 how can this be classified as an improvement?
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trolly
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by trolly »

Depends if HTML5 is now on by default or not. FF3 has HTML5 parser off (if it is implemented at all) and FF4 has it on by default.
You seem to rely on HTML4 behaviour. I guess if you fix the code it will work fine in both versions.

If i interpret "unbalanced" correctly you are missing some closing tags (or using autoclose on tags which require an explicit closing tag in HTML5).
Think for yourself. Otherwise you have to believe what other people tell you.
A society based on individualism is an oxymoron. || Freedom is at first the freedom to starve.
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Trev10
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by Trev10 »

Thank you for input trolly. All this stuff is way above my head. I have very little knowledge of protocols parsers or anything like that. Heretic that I am, I construct my pages with Dreamweaver WYSIWYG. I have no idea how to fix the code. I will say this from what I have read HTML5 standards are not supposed to be incompatable with previous standards. Seems in this instance that is not the case.

dickvl. I looked at the URL that you directed me to. I am afraid the contents make no sense to me. It seems clear that I will have to take down my site because I have no idea how to modify the code to suit FF4. Either that or hope that people will access it via IE. I am also concerned that FF4 trashed the functionality of Dreamweaver view in browser facility. I thought for a while that it had been infected by a virus attack. Thank you all for your input.
Trev10
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trolly
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by trolly »

Some hints:
For the script starting at line 845 opening and closing b tag have different case.A few lines up from line 845 there is a "document.write("<font face ='Verdana' size = 2 font color = white>");". The font tag is not closed inside the script.

For the other script at line 893 there is an opening b tag but no closing one.

Always close all tags in the script you opened.
Think for yourself. Otherwise you have to believe what other people tell you.
A society based on individualism is an oxymoron. || Freedom is at first the freedom to starve.
Constitution says: One man, one vote. Supreme court says: One dollar, one vote.
Trev10
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by Trev10 »

Trolly, Thank you for you interest in the problem that I had with my index page not displaying correctly in FF4. I have managed to resolve this problem by removing everything between line 226 and 233. FF4 now renders the page correctly. I have not yet put the page on line the old version is still in place. I shall be changing that later today.
viki78
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by viki78 »

If you can not fix your code yourself to be HTML 5 compliant, then you could mention on your webpage the specific problem with Firefox 4.

You already have comments about browser use on your webpage . You could add a line to the effect that some features do not at present work in Firefox 4 unless the HTML 5 parser is disabled.
AlfonsoML
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by AlfonsoML »

And what are you going to do as other browsers adopt the HTML5 parser?
Isn't it better to fix the errors in the page instead of asking people to use an old browser?
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jscher2000
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by jscher2000 »

viki78 wrote:If you can not fix your code yourself to be HTML 5 compliant, then you could mention on your webpage the specific problem with Firefox 4.

While surrendering is always an option, posters here usually prefer to fix their page!
GrannyCoder
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by GrannyCoder »

I agree with Trev 10, but then I've only authored about 20,000 web pages, managed 200 domains, and write and maintain software that processes about $500M per month, so I am just a newbie to all this "reliability stuff"

I do apologize if this offends the folks (manager? bench techs? midnight hacker/rambler) who did the testing of HTML5 modules for Firefox - or the spec sheets - but FF 4 has some gross issues compared to the 3x series - this being just one of them. This is NORMAL - as any x.0 and x.1 release is often loaded with severe issues which get "polished and buffed" as they reach towards the x.3 and x.5 versions. Sadly, many people don't make the upgrade - or stick with the reliable, smaller, tighter, faster OLDER versions (old DOS 3.33 is still the best thing and fastest bit of code Microsoft ever made - notice the version #) - and as a result, all kinds of pages are crashing ... its sort of the exact same blunder and issue (customer loss) that Microsoft ran into when they released Vista and corporate America ran screaming back to XP.

Sadly, the entire 4.x series of Mozilla - and the 5.x have shown a lack of QUALITY CONTROL - in what is to be - should be - we all pray WILL BE - the browser that unseats I.E. and gives old Google Chrome a run for the money.

OPEN SOURCE RULES - and as much as I like it sometimes - old Opera doesn't have it and Firefox, to survive this browser war, must be a bit more careful about what it releases - especially when incorporating a NEW and rather HARSH standard such as HTML 5 - absolutely rough and tumble and unpolished in its own right, so anyone incorporating it in a browser, should be extremely careful about giving a FATAL error - crashed - see ya - no page - tough luck - rather than a little warning in the Error Console that at least MEANS something...such as "HTML 5 ERROR - etc. - using older standard" and then continuing to process.

Put another way - when my Javascript engine stops dead in its tracks with the only error being 1 single "Unbalanced Tree" error, and the entire Javascript code for that page isn't even 10 lines - with zero CSS and only 1 image - and the rest of that page is 100% text, a few bolds, some lists and bracket Ps and BRs, and the browser has choked so hard it can't even respond to a href equals URL plus a pound sign anchor (which isn't even Javascript)....

... well when a browser can't read that and function then ya know ya got a weenie product that shouldn't have even been released...sorry man...ya just gotta do a little more testing if you expect to avoid bankruptcy like the rest of the corporations on planet earth today.

The solution? MAKE SURE you are backwards compatible in every way for at least 2 (3 is better) versions. Anything that worked in 2.0 should work in 4.0 PLUS MORE, otherwise your competition will eat you alive as folks make the switch to a more reliable ap.

My two cents...er ... three.
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malliz
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by malliz »

OK but you do realize your lecturing the wrong people? And to be blunt because you seem to approve of that. I see enormous amounts of long time web page designers and developers with to be honest really sloppy standards. Now I am not saying Firefox is perfect but then neither are a large amount of old school web pages developed by lazy people who stopped learning and caring well before IE5 came out.
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jscher2000
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by jscher2000 »

GrannyCoder wrote:Put another way - when my Javascript engine stops dead in its tracks with the only error being 1 single "Unbalanced Tree" error, and the entire Javascript code for that page isn't even 10 lines - with zero CSS and only 1 image - and the rest of that page is 100% text, a few bolds, some lists and bracket Ps and BRs, and the browser has choked so hard it can't even respond to a href equals URL plus a pound sign anchor (which isn't even Javascript)....

What page is that? It would be an interesting test case.

GrannyCoder wrote:The solution? MAKE SURE you are backwards compatible in every way for at least 2 (3 is better) versions. Anything that worked in 2.0 should work in 4.0 PLUS MORE, otherwise your competition will eat you alive as folks make the switch to a more reliable ap.

Hopefully someone will look at the problem of the HTML5 rendering engine running into limits that the earlier rendering engine did not. But how far to look? So far it seems the majority of the problems are improper nesting of <FONT> tags -- use of which has been discouraged since the release of the HTML 4 standard and formally deprecated in HTML 4.01 since 1999. These are not pages freshly crafted for Firefox 2, but pages using code that has been on the endangered list for a decade.
AlfonsoML
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by AlfonsoML »

GrannyCoder wrote:The solution? MAKE SURE you are backwards compatible in every way for at least 2 (3 is better) versions. Anything that worked in 2.0 should work in 4.0 PLUS MORE, otherwise your competition will eat you alive as folks make the switch to a more reliable ap.


It seems that you don't understand the meaning of the HTML 5 parser:

All the browsers will use it, it has been created to render correctly as much pages as possible and so in order to avoid unexpected problems they'll use that unified algorithm so that every browser understand your page in the same way.

What does it mean?

First: Firefox might be the first one to have implemented it (I'm not really sure about this), but the other browsers will follow path. So if you try to ignore Firefox because of this, you'll have to ignore the new versions of all the other browsers, so you'll only be able to use outdated browsers.

Second: Nothing is perfect in this world. Maybe the implementation has a bug or the algorithm itself hasn't been designed to cover your use-case. Anyway, this is not the place where such things can be changed. You should go to the W3C HTML group or the WHATG group and state that the HTML5 parsing algorithm has a bug in your page.
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Frenzie
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Re: Firefox 4 not displaying my web pages properly

Post by Frenzie »

AlfonsoML wrote:First: Firefox might be the first one to have implemented it (I'm not really sure about this), but the other browsers will follow path. So if you try to ignore Firefox because of this, you'll have to ignore the new versions of all the other browsers, so you'll only be able to use outdated browsers.

I remember about Chrome shipping with an "updated HTML5 parser" a while ago and Opera's got a few snapshots out, but I doubt it'll land till at least Opera 12.
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