the Mozilla skewed layout problem

The Watcher on 20/6/2002 at 10:55

I have found something interesting that may have some bearing on this. At home I run Squid on my Linux box and when I try to view the forums with Mozilla 1 going through the proxy the header on most pages is broken and the reply/edit page shows the misaligned entry box/broken javascript described by Daxim. When I connect stright to the internet from Mozilla the problem goes away (at least it hasn't occured in the couple of days since I discovered this). At work we have to connect to a proxy and sometimes the browser will sit for several minutes with just the blue header-bar background and the left FGN link showing, eventually the rest of the page will load and the reply/post page seems to work fine.

Being a suspicious guy by nature I'm guessing (and this is just a wild guess) that cyberreps are checking for and messing up or putting long delays on proxy operations - probably in a bid to prevent people using banner-filtering proxies. I must say I have no evidence to back this up and I won't have time to thoroughly investigate it until next week, but the difference in speeds and behavious between proxied and unproxied visits to these forums suggests to me that something odd is going on at cybereps, because the rest of the forums load and work fine...

(/me waits for someone to shoot his suggestion down in flames....)

David on 20/6/2002 at 17:13

I have a proxy at work and TTLG works fine through it :)

The Watcher on 20/6/2002 at 17:47

Quote:

Originally posted by David
I have a proxy at work and TTLG works fine through it :)

.. And in other news the police are baffled by the unexplained appearance of a large crater in a field just outside Glossop, apparently containing the remains of a badly charred and flattened idea..

The Watcher on 27/7/2002 at 19:18

Just a note to say that I have found a 100% successful way to prevent this happening: turn off javascript completely, not just image rollovers but the whole javascript engine:

- Edit menu, Preferences option.
- Advanced -> Scripts & Windows
- uncheck the "Navigator" checkbox.

With javascript disabled this way I have <i>never</i> had the skewed box problem - enable it, and it almost always is skewed. I <i>think</I> the problem may be these:

document.write('_version=10; //-->');
...
document.write('_version=11; //-->');

There is no comment start which matches the comment ends there - try removing them and I think that should fix the problem.

BTW, why exacly are the script tags split over document.writes anyway?

document.write('<SCR');

document.write('IPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">');

could be done just as easily with

document.write('******** LANGUAGE="JavaScript">');

Daxim on 27/7/2002 at 19:59

Because there are old browsers with broken Javascript implementations that go apeshit if they parse another <tt><script></tt> tag within a <tt><script /></tt> element.

Watcher, how do you explain that the problem never happens offline? Save all involved files locally and test again. I am not able to reproduce it from there.

Anyway, switching off JS globally is only a remedy for the symptom, not the solution to the problem.

Daxim on 27/8/2002 at 04:40

I managed to get some clueful people at the problem again today. They were able to to track it down to a timing issue when resolving nested scripts. Sometimes, somehow they don't get executed in the right order and then things break. For example, (http://daxim.ath.cx/load/mozjsconsolebrokenstringttlg) the console shows a clipped string and that then consequently makes the page layout fail.

A test case has been created and a bug opened. It might be even fixed before 2010. But this doesn't help the countless users that have the stable 1.0 or a browser based on it. So the bug submitter suggests to simplify the ad JS so that the problem can't occur anymore.

Code:

He says that in the original the JSv1.1 thing is a hint that this convoluted crap was a workaround for Netscape 3.

ignatios on 27/8/2002 at 21:52

The problem has not yet been corrected with the new version 1.1