18 posts tagged “firefox”

In case my Firefox 3.5.3 woes were due to Google Toolbar not being up to date, I installed a new one. Bad mistake.
   The new one is difficult to edit in 3.5.3, and each update took 20 to 60 seconds for the menu bar to stop being greyed out. During this editing process—and, in fact, through no intervention of my own—the Google Toolbar spanner icon disappeared.
   So how does one get it back? Ask Google?

You guessed it: in order to get back a missing icon, you need to click the spanner icon. Which is a problem when the spanner icon is missing.

Gosh, don’t these computer boffins test anything any more?
   I installed Firefox 3.5.3 today on my laptop. I had heard that most of my plug-ins were compatible with the program, and as it is the fourth incarnation of the 3.5 series, I thought: surely the errors had gone. But I kept some healthy scepticism on the grounds that ‘improvement’ in the computer world usually means that I would waste time downloading something and have it blow up in my face.
   This was no exception.
   It not only created a bug with one of our sites, which could have been coincidental, I found some rudimentary interface issues. Pressing down on the mouse wheel, on some sites, did not open the page in a new tab. Again, I doubt I am alone.
   In Firefox 3 in the past, one could select text and drag it into the Google Toolbar search box. The behaviour then would be: the text would be, if it was comprised of multiple words, framed in dumb quotation marks. The text existing inside the box would disappear in favour of the new phrase. The Google Toolbar would automatically begin the search.
   Not any more. And this is not Google’s fault. The latest toolbar works fine with Firefox 3.0.14 on my desktop machine. It just doesn’t work with 3.5.
   All that happens is that the text is pasted in to the box, wherever the cursor happens to land. The old text is not deleted. The search does not activate.
   This is one of the most basic, oft-used, everyday features in a web browser in 2009—but Firefox 3.5 does not support it.
   I was advised to upgrade on the Mozilla forums. That’ll teach me to listen to computer boffins. I now have a buggy browser that has caused me some frustrations already in its first few hours. It is also not that noticeably faster than its predecessor.
   People: test, test, test. I am not asking the world here. I am just asking that things work reasonably.
   Ten to one no one has bothered filing a big report because they are quite happy to tolerate crap. I shouldn’t judge: after all, I am still on Facebook. If I was that intolerant, I would file a complaint with them every day. Instead, I only file one every two weeks and still manage to refrain from calling Mark Zuckerberg a nonce.
   So a nickel’s worth of advice today: if you haven’t “upgraded” to 3.5, don’t.

How embarrassing for sits vac site Seek:

No one taught the copywriter how to pluralize.
   And this may be Firefox’s fault, but when I tried to find out more about Seek, I got a page with this gibberish: It doesn’t give me that much faith in the service.

Facebook is getting less able by the day. Here is how one page looks for me now:

As you can see, it’s far from complete.
   After my discussion with Xmangerm where I said I would not bother, I changed my mind today and bothered. I went to the help pages, but there is no link for reporting display issues. Many other issues are there, just not display ones—which suggests to me that Facebook doesn’t want to know.
   Kind of hypocritical, don’t you think, that Facebook doesn’t want to engage with us when that is the whole point of the site?
   Instead, I see this brave announcement:

For the best user experience, please upgrade your browser to the latest version of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 or Safari 3.

   I’m sure Microsoft would love to know that one can still ‘upgrade’ to Internet Explorer 7, and it’s because I am running Firefox 3.0.12 (the latest short of the buggy 3.5) that this issue exists.
   I used to suspect, in the back of my mind, that it was my computer causing this, because I was using an old XP machine a lot. With the new laptop, I am not so sure and I am willing to lay the blame at the companies more.
   The error is more likely Firefox’s, as Vox sometimes displays oddly now (the customizations disappear as does the header image), but you can never predict when the glitch will occur. On Facebook, however, it’s 100 per cent of the time. But as with most software, the more upgrades I download, the worse my user experience gets.
   I don’t know who is not implementing code properly, but my point here is another Facebook gripe: why don’t they wish to hear from us any more?
   Even if there was a display issues’ link in its ‘Help Center’, you are not likely to get to Facebook, just other users who are moaning about their inability to get Facebook to hear them. This section is very hard to use in terms of posting questions and answers.
   I used to remember a Facebook that would respond to users, and quite politely, in fact, but those days are long gone. I realize it cannot handle the numbers, but for goodness’s sake, at least provide a link to a knowledge base. Given there is a claimed 200 million user base, then tap in to some of these folks now, before it becomes yet another photo-misuse débâcle where the company has to backtrack and eat humble pie.

Here are some of the everyday things that happen to me when using Wordpress, yet I can find no mention of these errors. Any other blogger experiencing these? I have experienced this regularly in XP and Vista, but only recently. It’s either a Wordpress bug, a PHP bug on our server, or a Firefox bug. (Of the three, Firefox has changed; the others have not, to my knowledge.)
   1. The weird link glitch. No matter what I click on, Wordpress refuses to go to that particular page. So if I clicked ‘Manage’, Wordpress clicks through to every page but the one I requested. It might go to the dashboard, the comments, or, most regularly yesterday, the create-post page.
   2. The page appearing inside random boxes glitch. For no apparent reason, entire pages load into boxes where they aren’t supposed to go. This may happen to any box on any page in Wordpress. Here is me accessing one of our blog posts at Lucire at random to demonstrate:

We all know certain computer bugs only seem to happen to me, as I have chronicled frequently. Yesterday, we had a router fault. Today, my desktop machine refused to recognize my hard drive. And now, using Twitter, I notice that the type has gone monster-large:

   This has happened twice today. I did not hit Firefox’s enlarge function (impossible to do so “accidentally” on my laptop, without a numeric keypad), which would typically enlarge the background as well. You’ll also notice that the ‘Latest’ paragraph is in the correct point size. Has Twitter been fiddling around with its stylesheet, or did I stumble across a “large type” version of the site?
   I also managed to get search.twitter.com returning 404s today as my other accomplishment. I wonder if anyone else can see this page. I cannot—but it’s a simple, routine search for an earlier Tweet of mine. It seems I managed to break Twitter Search just by using its features (feeding in keyword, username and a date range). I believe others will get a 404 with the above link, too—which I think should dispel the growing myth among my friends that I have the worst luck with computers. Use them regularly enough, and you will break websites, programs and hardware, too.
   Meanwhile, PHP in Autocade prompted me (and no one else I asked to test this) to save a page, rather than open it, at different times today (see below). (This only began happening since Firefox “upgraded” to 3.0.11.) Again, this was unique to me, on both Windows Vista and Windows XP, though I believe the fault lies with the browser: One of my Twitter friends suspects it is advertising code, which is possible, since I managed to get this page working at other times today. However, it still begs the question: why just this one page, when the coding for the CSS and other elements to the page is identical to the rest of the site? And why does Firefox not want to open a page that is encoded ‘application/opensearchdescription+xml’, which I know is compatible with it?

PS.: Fellow Tweeter Ajay reports he experiences the first error.—JY

I was trying to access the BMW page at Autocade, something I have done without any problem a few hours before. And the following error, which has come up before when visiting other sites (notably the Unofficial Austin Rover Resource) came up:

   The other pages work, just not the BMW one. I ask it to open in Firefox and I get this window:    Any clues on what this error is? The same page worked fine a while back, and I expect it will work fine in a few hours’ time. This is one of Firefox’s strange errors. A brief Google search on the error message either reveals nothing relevant, or it is all in gobbledegook. (One says the stylesheet is wrong, which begs the most logical question: how come the other pages all work?)

Anyone else having this problem with Vox? You’re typing away and the browser goes back a page or two by itself. I noticed it was loading something called pixel.quantserve.com (or a file with a name similar to that) at the time. This happened three times when I was replying to Robin a minute ago—I didn’t even re-read my comment because I was in a rush to press ‘Post’ before I lost it again.