Background display problems with FF35

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alanstancliff
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Background display problems with FF35

Post by alanstancliff »

Ever since I updated my FF to 35, I notice the background of my WordPress site displays incorrectly. This happens intermittently. It does not happen in Chrome or IE on either my Windows 7 computer, or Windows 8.1 laptop, or in Safari on my Ipad.

I thought it was a problem in some of my coding or configuration of my website, and so I consulted a forum devoted to the WordPress theme I use (Atahualpa), but I discovered that this is not the case.

One of the forum moderators who uses a Mac and is on the other side of the country (USA) notes the same problem. Another person in Australia notes the same problem. The moderator suggested I report this to Mozilla.

I hope I'm not breaking any rules by posting a link to my website. My WordPress site is at http://15nowtacoma.info/. The discussion on the forum where this problem manifested itself is here: http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread ... post111359

Regards,

Alan
The unexamined life is not worth living—Socrates
Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto—Violeta Parra
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Gingerbread Man
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by Gingerbread Man »

In Firefox 35, only a bit of the background is visible near the top, after which there's just a solid black color. Although your stylesheets are a mess of WebKit-specific code and IE hacks, it doesn't seem to me like anything in there is responsible for this result.

In the latest Nightly, it seems consistently fine with e10s enabled. In a non-e10s window, there's a gap on the right side of the page; it's filled in with the background after a few seconds.

Unless you have a reduced testcase, I don't see a bug report about this going very far.
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James
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by James »

alanstancliff wrote:The moderator suggested I report this to Mozilla.

Note that mozillaZine is not a part of nor run by Mozilla so you are not reporting this to Mozilla directly. Also see bottom of right sidebar.
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alanstancliff
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by alanstancliff »

James wrote:
alanstancliff wrote:The moderator suggested I report this to Mozilla.

Note that mozillaZine is not a part of nor run by Mozilla so you are not reporting this to Mozilla directly. Also see bottom of right sidebar.


Right you are, James.

I don't want to sound like a kvetch, but when went to Bugzilla Mozilla, I thought "what a rabbit warren!" It is an seemingly endless tangle of trails and bunny trails leading to who knows where. It is not the most consumer friendly spot on the face of God's green earth.

I like Firefox quite a bit and always have. But to me, the feedback mechanism is clunky and confusing, and it is very bad theater.

I hope no one's offended.
**********************
By the way, your links to the Mozilla Complaint Department went to 404s. If you knew that, I appreciate your satiric sense of humor. Otherwise, I just yawn and march off to get a nice soothing cup of hot cocoa!

Regards,

Alan
The unexamined life is not worth living—Socrates
Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto—Violeta Parra
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by therube »

Oddly, it displays correctly in SeaMonkey.
In FF 35, after the background image "stops", it shows a white background (rather then black).
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Are we talking about this background graphic? http://15nowtacoma.info/wp-content/ata- ... logo-c.gif

It worked for me fine a minute ago on both Firefox and SeaMonkey, but upon refreshing the pages it is broken again.
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I think part of your problem may be the fact that that isn't a background image... it's just a regular image being stretched to fit the page using position:fixed, height:100%, width:100%. Why not just using a repeating background image like most websites?
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alanstancliff
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by alanstancliff »

Hey Patrick,

You wrote:
patrickjdempsey wrote:Are we talking about this background graphic? http://15nowtacoma.info/wp-content/ata- ... logo-c.gif

It worked for me fine a minute ago on both Firefox and SeaMonkey, but upon refreshing the pages it is broken again.


Nope! Your link is to just the graphic, which does not help in diagnosing the problem.

Instead, here's a URL to a file that illustrates the problem. It has the code for displaying the background. A moderator on the Atahualpa forum put together this demo when he confirmed the existence of this FF bug. Check it out.
http://15nowtacoma.info/extras/background_display.html
Run it and do a couple of refreshes. What do you see?

patrickjdempsey wrote:I think part of your problem may be the fact that that isn't a background image... it's just a regular image being stretched to fit the page using position:fixed, height:100%, width:100%.

That's incorrect. It actually IS a background image, Patrick. Go to the above URL and hit <ctrl-U> to view the source code. That's the same as the code in my webpage (which once again works in all major browsers except version 35 of Firefox, only a few days old)

patrickjdempsey wrote:Why not just using a repeating background image like most websites?

There are two reasons for not just following your suggestions
  • First off, if you look at the coding of the URL I just gave you above, you'll see that the background image is SCALABLE. That's so that the website will show up reasonably well for people looking at the site on a small device. I designed that background with its subtle color variations quite carefully for esthetic purposes, as well as the site's overall clarity of communication. A repeating smaller graphic cannot do the same job.
  • The second consideration is this: The site displays properly on Chrome, IE, Safari, and every version of FF until Ver 35 came out a few days ago. To emphasize: Every major browser on all platforms renders this properly EXCEPT the recently-released latest version of FF! I've received reports from people on a variety of platforms from 3 continents that confirm this. That says something to me. I'm not the only one with this problem.
So to me, the real solution is for Mozilla to fix this obvious bug. But likely Mozilla will not learn of this bug for days or weeks owing to the clunkiness of their bug reporting system.

Please don't take my kvetching personally. I'm just frustrated by Mozilla's obtuseness.

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to file a bug report. I'm not a genius, but I'm reasonably intelligent and have been playing with computers since 1983, and if I can't navigate Mozilla's bug reporting system, likely that bug reporting system flummoxes the majority of those who could provide Mozilla with valuable feedback.

That's plain bad theater and poor project management, in my opinion.

Regards,

Alan
The unexamined life is not worth living—Socrates
Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto—Violeta Parra
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mightyglydd
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by mightyglydd »

FWIW with Fx35 the background disappears half way down and it's just it's white below, on Fx36b1 with multiple reloads the background's from top to bottom, unless I'm missing something, it looks fine to me.
@Doesn't work correctly with SM here, only the very top's there and then its gray..
Last edited by mightyglydd on January 20th, 2015, 6:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by patrickjdempsey »

alanstancliff wrote:Nope! Your link is to just the graphic, which does not help in diagnosing the problem.


As I couldn't see the problem at all at first, I was linking to the graphic so I would know what you were actually talking about.

alanstancliff wrote:That's incorrect. It actually IS a background image, Patrick. Go to the above URL and hit <ctrl-U> to view the source code. That's the same as the code in my webpage (which once again works in all major browsers except version 35 of Firefox, only a few days old)


You mean the source that shows a normal IMG tag being stretched into a fake background? Just because you use the word "background" in the file name doesn't magically make it a background-image:

Code: Select all

<img src="http://15nowtacoma.info/wp-content/ata-images/ata-background/background-logo-c.gif" id="bg" />


Again, I think your issue will totally disappear if you just switch to the typical background-image type situation. It's not like Mozilla is going to fix this tomorrow... you may be talking about as much as 3 months before a fix comes down the pipe, in the meantime your site is broken in a way that's easy enough to avoid by just using a slightly different method.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... ound-image
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MarkRH
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by MarkRH »

IE9 and FF35 certainly handle it differently. Anyway, I'd dump the IMG tag and add the background to the BODY tag style.

Weird, I went back to the page in FF35 and the background image goes all the way down now. Before it went part way down with white color below it.
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I'm wondering it it's related to OMTC? Do you have layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled set to false MarkRH?
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by MarkRH »

patrickjdempsey wrote:I'm wondering it it's related to OMTC? Do you have layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled set to false MarkRH?


That is set to the default value of true.
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by mightyglydd »

MarkRH wrote:Weird, I went back to the page in FF35 and the background image goes all the way down now. Before it went part way down with white color below it.

Ditto here...
@Back on SM it's OK now too...Both look the same as IE11 :-k
Looks like "intermittently" is the key word..
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Re: Background display problems with FF35

Post by Gingerbread Man »

alanstancliff wrote:For the life of me, I can't figure out how to file a bug report.

:arrow: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1124051
If you want e-mail updates, either vote for the bug or add yourself to the CC list.
mightyglydd wrote:Looks like "intermittently" is the key word..

  1. Close the tab with the page in question.
  2. Clear the cache.
  3. Open background_display.html in a new tab again. Does the problem manifest itself again?
  4. Close the tab with the page in question.
  5. Clear the cache.
  6. Open datauri_thisshouldwork.htm. Does the image appear instantly, and does it cover the entire page right from the start?
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