Name this Firefix bug

August 21, 2008 8:22 AM

Can anyone think of a reason for this strange firefox bug?

The following is happening on several of my client's Firefox machines. Unfortunately they're in a different country and I can't get access to the machines to play with them myself, nor can I replicate the problem...

I've got a table that renders like this on every browser from lynx upwards:

[row a1    ][row b1     ][row c1         ]
[nextrow b1][nextrow b2 ][nextrow c2     ]
[oddrow a3 ][longcell b3][verylongcell c3]

but on these two machines it renders as:

[row a1][row b1][row c1]
[nextrow b1][nextrow b2][nextrow c2]
[oddrow a3][longcell b3][verylongcell c3]

The rows have style picked up from the TR tag but the columns don't line up and the width of the table varies from row to row. I've never seen a table break like this before.

My suspicion is that somewhere there's a firefox plugin eating the rendering process but I've got no idea how to attack the problem. Any suggestions?

posted by twine42 to computers & internet (7 comments total)

(In case it's not obvious, I'm using [] to show the edges of the table cell. They're not really there in the page... It just seemed easier than trying to draw this out with +, - and |...)
posted by twine42 at 8:24 AM on August 21, 2008

I think seeing the code (X/HTML and CSS if applicable) may help. Does all the code validate?
posted by Ky at 8:30 AM on August 21, 2008

Yeah, it's perfectly normal HTML and it validates perfectly... It's nothing more than the following style of thing...

  <table>
    <tr style="bgcolor:#ff0000">
       <td>stuff</td>
       <td>stuff</td>
       <td>stuff</td>
    </tr>
    <tr style="bgcolor:#00ff00">
       <td>stuff</td>
       <td>stuff</td>
       <td>stuff</td>
    </tr>
  </table>

It works exactly as expected on every other machine I've tested it on in OSX,W2000,WXP,and Centos and on Safari, Firefox2, Firefox3 and IE6. It's just these two FF2 machines that are causing the problems...
posted by twine42 at 8:36 AM on August 21, 2008

Looks like maybe the CSS is applying something like display:inline to table cells..?
You just need to apply a sensible process of elimination to identify the cause.
posted by malevolent at 8:36 AM on August 21, 2008

Do those two machines have a user style sheet by any chance? It shouldn't be hard for the client to check for that.
posted by jedicus at 8:40 AM on August 21, 2008

Standard firefox advice:

1) have them try it with a clean profile (firefox -P)

2) If it works there, copy over bookmarks and reinstall extensions one by one until you figure out which one causes the problem
posted by chrisamiller at 10:46 AM on August 21, 2008

Problem solved!

The client had an area where they could add their own html. Sanity checking of the area wasn't working and they managed to open about 15 p tags and two b tags, whilst closing none of them. I still have no idea why this caused the problem, but I fixed their code and everything returned to normal.
posted by twine42 at 5:39 AM on August 26, 2008