Bugs :
K-Meleon Web Browser Forum
You can talk about issues with k-meleon here.
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
po
Date: July 10, 2002 07:19AM
so tell 'em to configure their server, already!
the browser just obeys the MIME header...
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
sven
Date: July 10, 2002 07:50AM
Po is right, given server sends asp out as text/plain instead of text/html:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 07:30:34 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_throttle/3.1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.0 PHP/4.2.1 mod_log_bytes/0.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.9 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
ETag: "316c54-faf5-3d2b5c60"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 64245
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=88
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/plain
It's entirely server-side issue. Proabably caused by flakey configuration.
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
bongski
Date: July 10, 2002 08:37AM
Why does it display correctly in IE,Opera and Mozilla 1.1a?
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
Zeiram
Date: July 10, 2002 12:01PM
Because those browsers (particularly IE) tend to ignore the MIME headers and do their own guessing. Which can be a real pain in the ass: I've written a perl script on my server which returns some plain text. Of course, it sends correct headers (text/plain), but IE interprets the .pl extension as a perl document and thus wants to save it on my hard drive when I try to view it. Then I discovered K-Meleon which abides to MIME headers and my life was a lot easier :-)
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
bongski
Date: July 10, 2002 02:08PM
Would it be right to conclude that kmeleon and mozilla( my office computer which has mozilla 1 has the same "problem") are for "advanced users" like programmers?
If this is the case then how do you expect us "ordinary surfers" to like kmeleon when some sites don't display correctly? The problem is that we never know until we use the browser and find out about this problem. So the speed in loading pages is offset by the problem!
In other words--what is the point!
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
Andrew
Date: July 10, 2002 03:43PM
Bongski,
K-Meleon is not just for "advanced users". The problem is with the web site, not the browser. If they don't properly configure things on their end, it shouldn't be blamed on the browser when it doesn't display properly. If you bring such sites to our attention, we can contact the site and hopefully get them to configure things properly on their site
Andrew
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
bongski
Date: July 11, 2002 07:36PM
This is precisely my point,Andrew. I would also point this out to Po.This forum is the "bug" forum and I assume that making a complaint about a bug would enable those involved directly with kmeleon to do something. Surfers like me would not know whether the bug is kmeleon's or the webmaster's fault. Also how would I explain this MIME header thing to the webmaster when I myself don't know about it?
Actually I also got the same type of answer when I complained about opera before- this thing that "this browser is perfect go tell the web designer " and it is about time that I got a proper answer.
Thanks Andrew.
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
po
Date: July 12, 2002 12:00AM
it has nothing to do with the browser being 'perfect'... it's just that it actual takes what the server tells it literally, which is apparently unfashionable anymore, which is sad.
basically, if you told the webmaster what you posted in the forum, that should be enough for them to figure it out (and contact the right people, if they aren't actually the server admins). the kmeleon developers can't be expected to be chasing these people around, in all fairness... but still, sorry if the initial response seemed dismissive. i was tired, and i'm pretty sure this has been addressed at least once before on this forum... if obeying MIME headers really is 'odd' behavior for a browser these days, maybe this should be added to the FAQ?
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
Andrew
Date: July 12, 2002 12:18AM
Po,
Perhaps. Does someone want to dupe out a coherent explanation of what is going on that people will be able to identify when they read it?
Andrew
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
David
Date: July 12, 2002 06:51AM
I think the issue is that Internet Excluder (in particular) tries ~too~ hard to compensate for the errors made by careless and poorly trained web designers. Thus it guesses at what it believes the designer intended, not what he or she actually said.
This sounds like a good thing, but there are some downsides.
First, it's damaging the quality of code on the web. Imagine for a moment what would happen if something similar were done in elementary school. If teachers acted like IE -- quietly guessing what students meant instead of correcting their grammar and syntax -- how literate would those students be on graduation day? (Uh-oh, that's happening, isn't it?!)
Another huge negative is that when a designer specifically ~wants~ his or her web page to do something slightly unconventional, he or she has to resort to tricks, instead of using the mechanisms provided by the web itself.
A perhaps more famous example than the Perl one above is the matter of directing the browser to download certain types of files.
Suppose, for example, you as a webmaster want to provide an http download of a .wma (M$ audio) or an executable (.exe) file. You might think that you could just direct the server to send the file with a header designating it as type application/octet-stream. This should raise a download dialog in the browser.
However, IE thinks it knows better than the web developer what he or she wants.
IE in fact reads the MIME type header, but it often ignores it. It examines the file's extension, and goes even farther: it actually reads a part of the file, decides what it thinks it is, and takes the action it thinks is "probably" what you as the viewer want. It will certainly load the audio file into Media Player, and may well launch the .exe application -- even if you wanted to save them on your disk.
There are ways to force IE to download a file, fairly well known now, since they have to be used because these days 85% or so of our hits come from IE. But these server-side force-download kludges take some acrobatics on the part of the web developer that shouldn't be required. And they wouldn't be, if M$ and IE were good internet citizens and played by the rules.
But they aren't, and they don't.
Many webmasters running error-laden don't have a clue that their sites are broken for 15% of their viewers. If they test at all with other browsers than IE, it's not very exhaustive testing. But I find that with very few exceptions, when I tell them their sites are broken, they fix the problems.
So tell them!
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
po
Date: July 12, 2002 09:30AM
wow... that more than makes up for my initial half-assed response (i hope).
i'll just emphasize that, to my mind at least, messing with the nuts and bolts of the client/server protocol itself seems somewhat more insidious than the issue of some non-standard handling of markup, lest it sound like this is just another round of complaining about that...
oh well. i guess nothing beats a smooooth Optimal User Experience. eh.
Re: Latest beta Display Issue
Posted by:
bongski
Date: July 13, 2002 07:57AM
There, I sure generated a few responses to my posting.
I also want to mention about the Hotmail problem with Mozilla - the one that "checking a box selects all messages" not working in Mozilla. Well it works in Kmeleon beta! I hope it stays this way on the final release.