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Firefox Rendering Problems...

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Message

DM...

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 3:16 am

Guest

Hi all,

I get these weird rendering problems where parts of a webpage get
rendered incorrectly: actual window toolbars get displayed on the page
multiple times, or parts of pages from other tabs get mixed up with the
page I look at. This rendering problem is illustrated by those two
screenshots:

http://eonworks.com/tmp2/ff_2.png
http://eonworks.com/tmp2/ff_1.png

I experience such rendering problems on about 25% of the sites I visit.
Usually the problem is not as severe though. I viewed the same pages in
other browsers and they had no problem displaying them correctly. I
created a new FF profile and even run FF under a brand new Linux user
account with no add-ons, plugins, etc. Still the problem remains.
Refreshing/reloading the page and changing font sizes does not help.

I posted about this problem on mozilla's support forum and somebody
replied that he too has this same problem under Slackware 12.2 but not
under current. As I don't have the time to switch now, any ideas what I
need to do to fix this problem? I suppose it's just a matter of updating
a library or something else that FF or X relies on.

I use Firefox 3.5.2 (the newest version) under Linux Slackware 12.2
(2.6.27.7-smp #2 SMP, AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+) with RADEON 9600 SERIES
gfx card. All under KDE 3.5.10.

Thanks for your help.
--
Dawid Michalczyk
http://www.comp.eonworks.com - Linux shell scripts

Java Jive...

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:33 am

Guest

On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:16:42 +0200, DM <dm at (no spam) eonworks.com> wrote:

Quote:

I get these weird rendering problems ... illustrated by those two
screenshots:

http://eonworks.com/tmp2/ff_1.png
http://eonworks.com/tmp2/ff_2.png

It looks to me as though these sites are framed, and the frame source
may have been incorrectly set to be the parent frame page. If that's
not clear, I'll try again.

In a frame system, the page is divided into seperate window-lets
called frames, each of which has its own HTML source, usually an HTML
file. Here's a simplified example from my site (I probably can't
avoid unwanted line wrap here):

FrameCEMH.html:
....
<frameset cols="*,19%">
<frameset rows="25,*,38">
<frame src="./Resources/Frames/CEMHFrameHeader.html" />
<frame src="./CEMH.html" />
<frame src="./Resources/Frames/CEMHFrameFooter.html" />
</frameset>
<frame src="./Resources/Frames/CEMHFrameIndex.html" />
<noframes>
<body>
Personal Website: 
Charles Macfarlane - Poetry, Songs, Music; 
Java Jive - Technical Support.<br />
<br />
As your browser does not handle frames,
please follow this link to read
<a href="./CEMH.html">Charles Macfarlane Harrison</a>.
</body>
</noframes>
</frameset>
....

You can demo this for yourself on my site. First take a look at the
unframed version of the site, which, hopefully, will look alright to
you:
http://www.macfh.co.uk/CEMH.html

Then click 'Browse In Frames' in the top navigator bar, you should see
exactly the same page in frames - there should be a header and a
footer and the content you saw previously over most of the page width,
with an index down the right hand side. In ASCII Art (requires a
fixed font to align properly, if your ng software uses a proportional
font, cut and paste it into an editor that uses a fixed font) the
effect should resemble this:
| |
-----+ |
| |
| |
| |
-----+ |
| |

It would be interesting, and may be helpful diagnosing your problem,
to know if that is what you actually see on clicking 'Browse In
Frames'. To return to the unframed version, click 'Print Version'.

What seems to have happened with your example pages is something like
the following.:

FramedPage.html
....
<frameset rows="25,*,38">
...
<frame src="FramedPage.html" />
...
</frameset>
....

That is, a frame is incorrectly loading its own parent frameset html
file as its contents, rather than the intended content, leading to
endless recursion, like when you have two mirrors opposite each other
in a lift.

The question is: Why is it happening? Possibilities include:

1) Web author has genuinely hardcoded the frame src attribute with
the wrong file
2) Frameset systems require frames to be enabled, perhaps the browser
settings are partially but not completely knocking them out, though
OOTTOMH I can't imagine how.
3) Many frameset systems employ JavaScript, do you have it enabled?

In any of these three cases, especially the first and last, it's just
bad web authoring, in that either the page is hardcoded wrong, or the
<noscript> and <noframes> tags to control what happens in the above
situations have been omitted.

======================================

Please always reply to news group as the email address in
this post's header does not exist. Alternatively, use one of the
contact addresses at:
http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/JavaJive.html
http://www.macfh.co.uk/Macfarlane/Macfarlane.html

Douglas Mayne...

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 9:10 am

Guest

On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:16:42 +0200, DM wrote:

Quote:

After seeing your webpage, I decided to check that webpage and see how it
rendered on my hardware. At first, I could verify this bug on my
hardware on Slackware 12.2 with Firefox 3.5.1 installed. The page rendered
very much like yours.

Then I made sure that my patches were up to date. I missed a few. This
appears to address the problem- from the Changelog:

Fri Jun 19 18:22:20 CDT 2009
patches/packages/libpng-1.2.37-i486-1_slack12.2.tgz: Upgraded.
This update fixes a possible security issue. Jeff Phillips discovered an
uninitialized-memory-read bug affecting interlaced images that may have
security implications.
For more information, see:
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-2042

And I upgraded to Firefox 3.5.2 (as packaged for Slackware -current), and
the problem went away. At least for now.

--
Douglas Mayne

Chris Vine...

Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2009 2:18 pm

Guest

On Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:16:42 +0200
DM <dm at (no spam) eonworks.com> wrote:

Quote:

Hi all,

I get these weird rendering problems where parts of a webpage get
rendered incorrectly: actual window toolbars get displayed on the
page multiple times, or parts of pages from other tabs get mixed up
with the page I look at. This rendering problem is illustrated by
those two screenshots:

http://eonworks.com/tmp2/ff_2.png
http://eonworks.com/tmp2/ff_1.png

I experience such rendering problems on about 25% of the sites I
visit. Usually the problem is not as severe though. I viewed the same
pages in other browsers and they had no problem displaying them
correctly. I created a new FF profile and even run FF under a brand
new Linux user account with no add-ons, plugins, etc. Still the
problem remains. Refreshing/reloading the page and changing font
sizes does not help.

I posted about this problem on mozilla's support forum and somebody
replied that he too has this same problem under Slackware 12.2 but
not under current. As I don't have the time to switch now, any ideas
what I need to do to fix this problem? I suppose it's just a matter
of updating a library or something else that FF or X relies on.

I use Firefox 3.5.2 (the newest version) under Linux Slackware 12.2
(2.6.27.7-smp #2 SMP, AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2800+) with RADEON 9600
SERIES gfx card. All under KDE 3.5.10.

Thanks for your help.
--
Dawid Michalczyk
http://www.comp.eonworks.com - Linux shell scripts

Using slackware 12.2, I get the same thing on my laptop using a via
chipset and the openchrome driver and unichrome dri, but not on my
desktop which uses a nvidia driver.

I strongly suspect it is something to do with X. You (and me) will
probably have to live with it until a new Slackware version is
available and installed.

Chris.

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