Website Design and Usability FAQ

1. What was that about a Firefox layout bug?

   For a while our website had a problem when displayed with the increasingly popular Mozilla Firefox browser. We eventually tracked it down and fixed it. Let us know if you still have any problems viewing the site.

   The reason this took a while to fix was that it was hard to reproduce the problem reliably. Sometimes the layout would be messed up, and sometimes it would be fine. It turned out that it was a bug in reflowing the content. Part of the page would be downloaded, and if it took more than a certain amount of time to download then Firefox would display what it already had. Then, when the page has finished downloading, Firefox should reflow the page and display it in its final layout. This is the bit that wasn't working.

   To track down the exact piece of our content or styling that was triggering this problem we set up a test script that only let a sample page be downloaded slowly, and then cut bits of the HTML and CSS out until we found the bit that was causing problems. It turned out to be the CSS overflow property, which we had specified on <hr> elements. Nobody can remember why we had it, so hopefully it wasn't needed. Now that it has been removed the site seems to be back to normal.