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tavilach · Dec 22, 2004, 02:15 PM

I love Firefox, but unless I'm going crazy, Gecko sucks.

Look at this page: http://www.actransit.org/riderinfo/mapsandschedules.wu

Notice how the text is flowing off of the sidebar? The same thing happens (sometimes) on Slashdot.org...

How can people hype Gecko so much when it's so flawed?

Raining Down in Texas · Dec 22, 2004, 03:12 PM

Unfortunately many web sites are coded to support the quirks of Internet Explorer and do not render or behave properly on other browsers.

My family was visiting over Thanksgiving, and my brother wanted to print out his United Airlines boarding pass before going to the airport. It rendered fine under Safari, but most of the frames would not print including the one that contained the boarding information. My brother and Dad both razzed me about how the Mac must suck because they have no problem printing things like that on Windows. One other really bad quirk of United's system is that it only gives you one crack at printing a boarding pass, so you couldn't even look at it in another browser.

I sent a note to the United web master, and he said that their system only works with IE or Netscape 4.7. He said that they are considering making it compatible with other browsers in the future, and that they plan on fixing the inability to reprint the document.

If you come across a web site that does not render properly in a Gecko browser, drop a note to the web master and point it out. If they really care about the presentation of their site, they will appreciate the input.

bmedina · Dec 22, 2004, 04:40 PM

The Slashdot bug has been fixed on the trunk. If this particular bug irks you a lot, you can file a bug with bugzilla. The transparency of the development process is half the fun of Gecko.

Mediaman_12 · Dec 22, 2004, 05:00 PM

Originally posted by tavilach:
How can people hype Gecko so much when it's so flawed?

It's the pages that are flawed not Gecko. Good web designers code pages that validate, lazy developers only check there pages in whatever version of IE in on there Windows PC.

Ludovic Hirlimann · Dec 23, 2004, 07:15 AM

Originally posted by Raining Down in Texas:

I sent a note to the United web master, and he said that their system only works with IE or Netscape 4.7. He said that they are considering making it compatible with other browsers in the future, and that they plan on fixing the inability to reprint the document.

If you come across a web site that does not render properly in a Gecko browser, drop a note to the web master and point it out. If they really care about the presentation of their site, they will appreciate the input.

You can also open an evangelism bug in Mozilla's bug database, so mozilla.org's evangelism team can contact the webmaster and explain them how they should support Gecko and why it's important (gecko took something like 2% market share in less than a month).

Millennium · Dec 23, 2004, 07:47 AM

The problem is with the site's code, not Gecko. The code is a complete mess.

But as for this particular problem, this "bleeding off of the edge of the menubar" appears to actually be what the site was coded to do. It's a natural side effect of the fact that it's coded not to wrap any of the text in the links. Given that the browser has been specifically told not to wrap text, all it can do is bleed it off of the edge.

I suspect that IE doesn't respect the code to not wrap the text, which would explain why it seems to "work fine". But what Gecko is doing here is actually the correct behavior, given what I can figure out from the train wreck that site calls its code.

monkeybrain · Dec 23, 2004, 08:14 AM

Those links seem to render fine in Safari. Is Safari doing something here to compensate for IE-designed sites?

Angus_D · Dec 23, 2004, 09:34 AM

Safari doesn't use Gecko.

While it is really a problem with the page's horrendous code, it's still suboptimal performance of Gecko to render it incorrectly if it's possible to render it better.

File a bug.

wataru · Dec 23, 2004, 10:45 AM

Originally posted by tavilach:
How can people hype Gecko so much when it's so flawed?

That's pure ignorance. It's not Gecko's job to fix broken code.

Millennium · Dec 23, 2004, 11:22 AM

Originally posted by tavilach:
How can people hype Gecko so much when it's so flawed?

This is a case of an incompetent Web developer, not a flaw in Gecko.

tavilach · Dec 24, 2004, 02:42 AM

Originally posted by Millennium:
This is a case of an incompetent Web developer, not a flaw in Gecko.

Why then, as Angus suggests, does it work in Safari?

Also, it must just be a Mac Firefox bug, because Firefox is the browser of choice for Slashdot users...and wouldn't they...umm...care?

wataru · Dec 24, 2004, 04:22 AM

Originally posted by tavilach:
Why then, as Angus suggests, does it work in Safari?

Also, it must just be a Mac Firefox bug, because Firefox is the browser of choice for Slashdot users...and wouldn't they...umm...care?

In this case, Safari renders it wrong, because the text in question is specifically designated as non-wrapping.

If you actually read Slashdot with any frequency, you'd know that people bitch about it all the time. They are also smart enough to realize, however, that the problem is that Slashdot's HTML is a big pile of crap. Try this as a temporary fix.

pliny · Dec 24, 2004, 07:13 AM

Originally posted by Raining Down in Texas:

I sent a note to the United web master, and he said that their system only works with IE or Netscape 4.7.

!!!

Like how old is that release? These people are on the friggin moon.