Firefox bugs affecting MediaWiki

This is a list of known Firefox bugs that affect MediaWiki sites such as Wikipedia.

The aim is to create a list of the top 10 bugs that affect MediaWiki. If we can get a consensus on what these bugs are, we may be able to officially submit a request from the Wikimedia Foundation to the Mozilla Foundation to address these issues with some priority.

Open bugs

Misc

• Bug 79021: All stylesheets are loaded regardless of rendering media - Results in loading stylesheets that are not required, which makes the Wikipedia load slower and with more bandwidth used than is necessary (although it does still work).

• Bug 184452: Necko - Allow handling of files > 2gig (>2 GB) - Downloading large dumps over http via Mozilla browsers will fail.

• Bug 14984: Tables overlap right floats (e.g., right-aligned images or tables) — right-aligned images (e.g. thumbnails) and right-aligned tables (e.g. taxonomy templates, portraits+biography, etc.) are overlapped by wide tables.

Non-latin character encoding

• Bug 322777: – Links overlap at Gujarati wiki projects: gu.wikipedia gu.wiktionary gu.wikibooks if page contains RTL characters - gu:Main Page renders the site notice at the top incorrectly.

• Bug 356049: Firefox 2.0 won't render Unicode Indic Fonts correctly even with the correct fonts installed, see w:Wikipedia:Enabling complex text support for Indic scripts#Check for existing support and #Unicode fonts

Save Page

There are a number of limitations in Firefox's "Save Page" action. The workaround is to use the Firefox extension ScrapBook, or Mozilla Archive Format may be suitable for Firefox 1.5.x users.

• Bug 126309: Save page does not save @import -ed CSS - this makes saved pages from Wikipedia very ugly, as the required screen stylesheet is not saved together with the page.

• Bug 115107: CSS not fixed up by webbrowserpersist ("save page as, complete" omits background images) - Relative links to images or other media included in CSS are not resolved when saving a local copy. Currently not an issue until bug 126309 is fixed, but then will be a problem. Absolute links will work but require web connection.

• Bug 372474: After "save page as, complete" opening the saved page is missing all images - Encoded image filename in the saved HTML does not point to the saved image, resulting in images not being displayed in the local copy.

Printing

• Bug 255982: – hang (infinite loop) printing floats over page break where containing box contains no non-float items

• Bug 350684: – Print preview of Wikipedia page hangs if scale factor other than 100% - SeaMonkey hangs if the scaling of pages to be printed is not 100%. A lot of the traffic on this bug is noise due to the other bugs that also cause the browser to hang when printing.

Firefox 2 bugs

• Bug "shy": soft hyphen is displayed as a hard hyphen - this bug prevents Wikisource from using soft hyphen in transcription of original texts.

Fixed bugs, not yet released

• Bug 218277: losing Unicode no-break spaces - saving article with Firefox will convert all no-break spaces 0xA0 into standard spaces 0x20. Mostly affects French and Russian Wikipedias. Fixed only in Firefox 3 (release planned on November 2007).
  • MediaWiki needs its bug 6790 fixed (a workaround patch applied) to work with older versions of Firefox. (The bug is not fixed yet, though it has a patch proposed.)

• Bug 366797: Revise the Location Bar - Instead of showing encoded URLs like http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D1%8F in the address bar, show stuff like http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Вікіпедія which a Ukrainian speaker could presumably understand, versus no hope of understanding the earlier version. This occurs on all articles with non-ascii names and affects most non-English Wikipedias.

The workaround is to use the Firefox extension Locationbar², which provides several anti-spoofing features that can be disabled, and Human URL.

See also Bug 150376 and Bug 105909.

• Bug 285608: – hangs when page with float printed (Status: Fixed in trunk)

• Bug 331039: – Hang in printing with floats with overflow:auto - Firefox hangs when printing de:Bruttoinlandsprodukt and en:Solstice (Bug 376218) and en:Poland (Bug 367508). This bug affects a large number of situations where infoboxes and images are consecutively placed along the right hand side of the article in such a way that one crosses the page break. The layout engine infinitely loops while trying to decide which page the floated block should appear on. (Status: Marked as fixed by bug 285608)

• Bug 360224: Cannot print the Wikipedia french article on Mercure (the planet) - Firefox hangs when preparing the layout of fr:Mercure (planète). This is a duplicate of one of the other bugs. (Status: Marked as fixed by bug 285608)

• Bug 323652: – Print Preview or Print hangs with 100% CPU load - This bug has become a "meta" bug that tracks a few bugs. (Status: Marked as fixed by bug 285608)