00-08-12 The giant list of Netscape bugs... ================================== This is a compilation of bugs and flaws I have discovered in various versions of the Netscape "Navigator" and "Composer". Important is that most(70..80% ?!!) of all spontaneous Netscape crashes under Windoze are caused by the advertizing-virus "aureate"/"radiate",which gets regularly installed as a buggy component of many advertisement-payed freeware/ shareware programs.The nastiest property of this "virus" is that it makes Win- doze and any Browsers on it extremely unstable(causing random "General Protec- tion Faults") and eats RAM,disk space and slows down the Internet access in a way that everybody scolds against Micro$oft products or the browser,although this time it isn't their fault.Due to this crashy thing is no genuine virus, but an extremely impertinent and buggy program component,normal antivirus pro- grams neither alert nor remove it and though it is extremely widely spreaded. Read more about this awful trojan horse and how to get rid of it on the OptOut homepage: http://grc.com/optout.htm All Netscape versions(around 4.6x and earlier): ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Bugs in Netscape Composer: *Each time when "Netscape Composer" loads a HTML page,it messes around with the spaces in it,which often has really annoying side effects: -Table cells those intentionally contain multiple lines with each only a space characters to expand them visibly as an artistical style element,often get replaced by only a single line with a space char. -Also multiple blank lines directly below a table often get stubbornly re- placed by a single blank line as soon such a page gets re-loaded into the Composer. -When a table gets placed directly below another one with only one or multi- ple blank lines between them as a "distance piece",while the page gets later loaded again into Composer these lines get often simply erased,causing both tables to be drawn close together in the browser afterwards. -When a table cell(especially embedded into other tables) contains centered text blocks between uncentered text blocks,each time the Composer reloads the page,it adds an aditional blank line before and after the centered text block. (In complex table layouts it is really a pain to always fix this by hand. Possibly this is a stack processing bug,which counts blanks wrongly.) -Before and after horizontal seperator lines and even directly adjacent link tags sometimes similar bugs occure when Composer loads such pages. (The behavior with adjacent link tags is extremely badly predictable(some- times a space between them disappears,while at very similar places(dependant from whether a horizontal separator is directly following and/or tables are nearby??) the space remains undamaged.I guess it could be a stack sequencing bug.) -In typewriter style fixed font texts all spaces get unneccessariely replaced by the HTML blank symbol,which enlarges text files about 1/4 as soon they ever got loaded into the Composer. (Replacing the blank symbols with genuine spaces in such a text block again by using a text editor fixes this memory waste without showing any visual difference,though there is no reason to use the 5 byte large HTML blank sym- bols instead.) *When typing within large tables,the entire composer window flashes every time,though when large tables are used as the bases of a page layout,texts need to be written outside the table and pasted into them,which makes the use of tables quite arkward. (I assume that the problem is in the redraw algorithm,which always redraws the entire table instead of checking if the visible part has really changed its size and needs to be redrawn.Adding such a check would help alot;with the use of a "dirty rectangle" algorithm and by drawing the new table(including background) "over" the old one without erasing the screen each time,the flicker could be easily reduced.) *Sometimes at the rightmost end of texts a rectangular character appears in the Composer window.When it gets deleted manually,this causes sometimes the entire Composer to crash(and disappear from the screen?). *In Composer when the font size is changed in preferences menu,the actually edited HTML page gets reloaded without previously saving it and without any warning;when it was not saved,all data are LOST - Arrg! Bugs in Netscape Navigator: *In certain HTML pages(designed with "Internet Explorer"?) the layout gets messed up entirely in a way that all text blocks and pictures get drawn horizontally into an area way wider than the windows( =>scrollbar...) and clicking on window links doesn't work anymore.(Often this phenomenon only appears after resizing the window?) Examples: http://www.liquid-latex.com/sitemap.htm (Also try to click here on the picture button mess at the top... nothing hap- pens! This site shows also the table colour-block bug when images are off.) -By pressing the "image" button often the images despite don't get reloaded. (Activating "autoload images" helps sometimes,but often the Navigator needs to be quitted and restarted. By the way:Half of the sites work better with "autoload images" off,while in the other half turning it on is either neccessary or doesn't disturb;this option therefore urgently needs a button on the front panel,and not just an option deeply hided in a preferences menu.) -I multiple times had the situation,that an already displayed picture on a HTML page could not be dowloaded(after a connection problem??),although it was already displayed and though must have been still in the cache. (It must urgently be made possible to keep cached pictures etc. downloadable after the connection has crashes etc.,because everything else is depressing and wastes phone costs.) -Tiled background image textures in tables and table cells with invisible frames are not aligned with the background image when both are equal.(Each cell starts with the left upper corner of the texture in its own left upper corner;this looks as stupid as when someone mis-glued a wallpaper. *As soon images are turned off,Netscape(German version on Windoze95B) displays in nested tables instead of the selected table cell background colours only a tiny,square box(ca. 1*1cm) in the left upper corner of each table cell in the correct colour,while the rest remains in the page background colour. (This looks really awful and messes up the page design alot;I use invisible nested tables e.g. to colorize the frames of the included tables.) -As soon a HTML page has a table with a backdrop image as its background, single colour backgrounds of included tables and their table cells(those have no intended background images to be displayed instead) are not drawn at all anymore;instead only the backdrop image appears everywhere in the entire embedded table. (This is EXTREMELY ANNOYING,because it limits the usability of tables as graphical design elements alot and unneccessariely wastes memory,because for every colour of single coloured table backgrounds a single coloured GIF/ JPG picture needs to be created and later downloaded from the webpage as table/cell beackground,just because the browser stupidly ignores the selected background colour of all cells. When tables/table cells are intended by the page designer to show the page background,then he will anyway never select an own colour but no image tag for them,therefore for the case that this behavior of the browser was choosen intentionally,it is definitely a serious design flaw.) -When the download of a HTML page gets stopped and later resumed,in spite of this an ugly "transfer interrupted" message remains in the downloaded page, instead of resuming the download perfectly as known from binary files. Windoze95/NT version(up to 4.6x): ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -In "Netscape Composer" the colour selection menu is intended to display the hexadecimal HTML colour values when the mouse cursor touches it,but instead wrong values(meaningless numbers) appear in the "bubble help" box at the mouse pointer. (This is QUITE ANNOYING,because I always need to examine the HTML sourcecode by hand to find out which colour a certain text part uses.(It would also help alot when colours of text ranges would be copyable by drag'n'drop.) -Sometimes the horizontal window slider of the Composer(and Navigator?) disap- pears although the picture is not centered.(Resizing the window helps here.) -In Composer when after saving certain page changes are done(editing the page keywords etc.?),the greyed out "save" button doesn't get enabled again,though I need to type and delete a charactor to reactivate it to save the changes. (Despite the Composer seems to know that I had changed the page,bacause after clicking on "quit",it shows a warning message that data are still unsaved. *The "init()" method of Java applets often gets called multiple times by the Navigator after loading the applet,which can terribly mess up static varia- bles and external ports(JDBC,VRML etc.) when no semaphore in the applet ex- plicitely traps these multiple launch attempts.(I believe to remember that also "start()" before "init()" sometimes got called before the above bug oc- cured??) -The VRML plugin "CosmoPlayer"(all versions of 1998?) in combination with Java tends to crash extremely easy and the EAI never worked on a network of faster Windoze NT PCs.The Java method "Browser.getBrowser()" continuesly only re- ceives a nullpointer,no matter how often I tried it.(I nearly failed a prac- tical course at the technical college where I study software-technics by a though non-working EAI project.) On my Windoze95B PC at home the thing ran well without this bug;I guess it could be a race condition problem. (CosmoPlayer generally crashes terribly easy;null-pointers in .wrl files or Java programs were mostly lethal for it.) Linux version (4.6x and earlier): ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -Under fvwm or fvwm95 with XFree86 window manager sometimes certain charcters of a specific(typically small) font size and type turn into pixel garbage and usually stay so until the browser gets restartet.(I.e. that e.g. all small "j" and "a" letters of the same type in newsgroups and HTML pages turn into a mess of pixels.) -Text typed into HTML forms of the Navigator often doesn't reappear after pressing the "back" button;instead a blank form is reloaded from the server. Example: The Netscape bug-report sending form. :( later bugs found until 2000-04-17: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (Unfortunately most of the above bugs have NOT been fixed yet!!!) -Using "undo" in the "Composer" makes similar rubbish in the spacing(or even more?) like re-loading the HTML page into the Composer. -The "Composer" sometimes shits rectangular garbage characters into the text between text colour/font/attribute changes when such a page gets reloaded into Composer.Also spaces can disappear at such positions. -The German Netscape4.6 on Windoze95B sometimes crashes with a failure in the module "ADVERT.DLL".The nasty thing is that when I attempt to close the Windoze error message,the message box just appears again and again and though makes it impossible to shutdown Windoze =>I am forced to quit it with a hard reset(which could result in a harddisk data damage).This bug most often ap- pears when I attempt to open a downloaded HTML page which contains javascript etc.(advertisement banners?) while I am in offline mode.Generally such pages often crash the Navigator. (This Bug gets caused by the Aureate advertizing virus and not by the Navi- gator itself;OptOut removes it.) -The "Navigator"(only Linux?) crashes when attempting to load very large hires pictures. Linux version: -In Netscape 4.72 for Linux the text cursor in composer appears in black on black(i.e. invisible) and also non-3D horizontal lines are drawn black on black too.(Lines/bullets should rather been drawn in the actual text colour instead.) -In Netscape for Linux the font sizes are totally messed up and can not be ad- justed well from preferences,no matter which fonts are chosen.Though either headlines appear way to large,or (more often)the small fonts get so small that they are unreadable. To fix this I recommend to make the smallest allowed character size adjust- able to force the browser always to display this size instead of any smaller ones. General Netscape improvement hits: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *Half of all sites work very slowly with "autoload images" on,while in the other half turning it on is either neccessary or doesn't disturb;this option therefore urgently needs to get a button on the front panel,instead of remai- ning deeply buried in a preferences menu.) *To use time and phone costs more efficiently,a typical internet user enjoys the multitasking by having multiple Navigator windows open,in those he reads and downloads from many different sites simultanously. It is therefore URGENTLY neccessary to make it possible to give each Naviga- tor window own settings;especially the actual download directory,the "auto- load images" mode and the cookies settings would be urgently necessary to be selectable per window. (The latter is also important for security reasons,because due to only few people enjoy to waste phone costs by waiting for a slow,but security relevant site by not simultanously browsing and downloading from other sites,separated cookie settings etc.for each window and possibly site(e.g. stored with the bookmarks) would be urgently necessary.) -I recommend to add a user defineable button bar,onto which selected options from the "preferences" menu can be dragged with the mouse and saved into the config,to make it possible to give each window a handy set of buttons for the most important preference parameters,those then can be changed se- parately for each window.(Each button should have 3 modes:on,off and default, while default is the setting from the preferences menu.) Optionally the but- ton states should be savable into the bookmark file,to make it possible to turn e.g. for slow sites "autoload images" off,which the browser remembers each time the URL gets accessed again. (I remember that some of these important features were already included in the Netscape Navigator 3.0.) -The relative picture size(scaling factor) in ratio to the screen resolution should be made selectable in the browser preferences.(For people with very high or low resolution monitors this would improve the look of WWW pages alot.) -The resume of downloads should urgently be made available for more than 1 file,because a typical internet user often downloads many files simultanous- ly,and when he accidently cancels a download and clicks the wrong download link to resume,he must download the entire file again,which wastes time and causes unneccessary internet traffic.(The "Go!zilla" plugin has already such features.) -The Navigator urgently needs a feature to download an entire HTML page inclu- ding all picture(evt. plus Java animations etc.),because manual downloading of it wastes much time and typically one forgets to download some of the do- zends of GIFs etc. a modern WWW page layout consists of. (As far I know,Micro$oft's ActiveX virus spreader "Internet Explo[r|d]er" has this even as a standard feature.) -Downloaded HTML pages often don't work,because they attempt to load adver- tisement banners from a server and don't display anything when offline.Such pages should therefore be automatically convertible during download,or the Navigator should in offline mode at least ignore any unfulfillable connec- tion requests and despite display the rest of the HTML page. Example: http://superpong.8m.com/intro.htm -The entered contents of large HTML forms should urgently be made saveable,be- cause often a sent form only causes an error message(or crashes Navigator) and afterward everything needs to be typed in again.(To cut and paste to an editor window is very arkward,especially when the forms has lots of fields and many buttons.) -An external history logfile of the links of all accessed sites of a certain time or session should be (crash proofly)creatable by the user to avoid to forget the URL of a just discovered internet site. Flaws in the HTML standard: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In the HTML standard a few little deficits those seriously complicate the design of good looking web pages and/or waste much memory to do so.Certainly many of these things can be done with Java ot JavaScript etc.,but this is a way to costly approach for simple things like these: -It should urgently be a feature added to HTML to mirror pictures and/or turn them by 90 degree;it would seriously ease to make interesting page layouts and significantly reduce the memory consumption caused by the tons of mir- rored images reduntantly floating around for symmetry reasons yet. -Also background pictures should be made more precisely placeable and adjust- able(like the ones described above) and optionally displayable only once in- stead of tiled. -Pictures should also be made scaleable depending on the actual browser window size(as known from tables).If the hight to width ratio of them shall be va- riable or stay constant should be selectable by HTML tags. -Also Java applets urgently need to made sizable relatively to the actual browser window sizes;it is very annoying when an applet program is displayed much larger or smaller than the actual screen size,or when for each possible size a HTML page with different applet parameters needs to be created. (This is one main reason that makes Java game applets often look stupid.) -Simple graphical elements(for decorative frames etc.) should be easily de- scribable as a part of HTML in a kind of (Postscript-like)vector graphics language and(unlike Applets) be placeable everywhere on the HTML page(e.g. also in the background) without affecting the rest of the HTML fuctionality. (I.e. that unlike certain today's pages those consisting of a giant applet for such purposes,these pages should remain displayable in any HTML browser, no matter if it supports these graphical features or not.) -Picture replacement texts should be treatable like text in an ordinary table cell.(This would especially make replacements for large GIF/JPEG titles look much better.) -The standard fonts should be deformable,shadowable,multicolorizable etc. in a standarded way using a set of simple parameters.(This would take way less space than loading additional fonts or making hires GIFs for each headline.) -Text parts should be highlightable by a different background colour(or even image?). -For making HTML pages better printable,there should be a "new page" tag available that gets only used during printing(similar like in LaTeX). -More modern picture compression algorithms than the fewcoloured GIF and the blocky JPEG should be included into the HTML standard.(Actual wavelet com- pression can display pictures with way less blockieness or colour reduction, and also sharp text in front of a blurred photo doesn't waste lots of memory anymore.) MAY THE SOFTWARE BE WITH YOU! *============================================================================* I CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler I I (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!) I I ! I *=============================ABANDON=THE=BRUTALITY==========================* {http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/e_index.html}