Firefox oddity

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This is puzzling. At present, on a particular page in The New Republic
( http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/a…tar-gazing.aspx ),
the bottom half of a very long page looks blank, in Firefox 3.0.1 on my XPH desktop.
Same in Firefox Safe Mode, so it’s not the addons.
But in Opera I can see the whole page, and in Firefox on a Mac I can see it too.
In FF on a netbook, I again see only half the page.
Half the page is many screens in length. But in all cases
it looks as though the loading of the page is complete.
This looks like a minor matter, but, if anyone has a clue, I’d be interested.
[Edit: I should have mentioned that all the items I’ve said are reproducible.]

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Yep – I see the same thing in FF (Dell Dimension 9200). As well, the font on the page changes from a small font to a larger font part way down (before the blank section). In IE, the whole article seems to be rendered in a Times New Roman (or similar) font, but in FF, it looks like an Arial font. Interesting.

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That usually is caused by setting the height of an element like a

to a value in excess of 32767 pixels. I’m not sure whether that is the culprit in this case.

The workaround is not pretty, but you can read the text of the page by disabling the styles: View > Page Style > No Style. This applies to the current tab, rather than the current site.

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Jefferson, thanks. The “no page style” does enable the text to be seen in this case.
I’m going to remember this from here on …
But, is there a simple reason why there was no problem in Opera, and in the
Mac Firefox? [And/or, is there a setting that can or should be changed?]
Any tips on this would be appreciated.

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Sorry, I misremembered when the 32767px limit was triggered. It is related to using the overflow property. This bug lists the hideous details: Bug 215055 – Content of tall pages is clipped and can’t be displayed if overflow!=visible [16 bit widget coordinates] (big-long) @ Bugzilla.mozilla.org. Why is the problem manifested in Firefox on Windows but not Mac? I have no idea (but maybe it is mentioned in the bug).

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I’m wondering if it’s a similar yet different bug because I’m seeing a few others on that page. Probably all related.

For me, it all starts around the comment by “The Plank” on June 5 2:19pm. That’s just a bit before halfway down.
1. At his comment and below (actually starts at the posting date of the previous comment) clicking doesn’t work. If you hover over the text you should get the I-beam cursor (or whatever) but instead you get the pointer.
2. Plus, hovering brings up the last tooltip you saw – from any open page, not just the current one.
3. Since you can’t click you can’t select, but you can if you start selecting from a point before the bug appears (like in the previous comment). If you do, and try to drag the selection into the buggy area, the page jumps to the top. However Select All works, and Copy does include the text in the buggy area (and even the cropped/hidden text further on).
4. Right-clicking the buggy area brings up the context menu, but at the top of my screen (using Win 7 RC). Horizontally it’s positioned correctly. If you select something that works and right-click the buggy area you get the normal right-click menu, not the one you should get when text is selected.

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Thanks all. I looked at the bug page Jefferson linked to,
and there are indeed some cases where Macs don’t have the bug.
I couldn’t follow the intricacies. The bug discussion is neither
pretty nor digestible by a tyro. Elsewhere, I found an item
that might be related, and if so there’s a rumor (?)
that FF 3.1 might handle this situation better. For whoever
understands these things, I quote:
“text-overflow property, which is now in CSS3 and has implementations
in Safari, and Opera. Firefox still does not support this feature,
but I have heard that it will in Firefox 3.1.”
Again, thanks!

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