Archive for the ‘web browser’ Category

Problem with Firefox’s new built-in PDF viewer and print-bingo.com

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Annoyingly, within the last month or so, Firefox has switched it’s default PDF viewer to it’s built-in renderer. Generally, this is a good thing. It means that eventually we won’t need to all have Adobe Reader on our computers. But, annoyingly, this built-in renderer has issues with multiple PDF files, including those generated by our bingo card generating website, print-bingo.com.

For now, we have added a warning prompt for Firefox users to tell them why their bingo cards are missing the numbers or words within the grid. And now, the harder part, trying to figure out what part of the PDFs we use are incompatible with Firefox.

This is hugely annoying.

For anyone who stumbles on this, this page gives information on debugging pdf.js (the basis for the embedded FF viewer):

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/wiki/Debugging-pdf.js

sIFR (and Flash) is dead. Long live sIFR (and Flash)!

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

It’s hard to believe, but only a few years ago I eagerly looked for excuses to use Adobe Flash to make a website just a bit more interactive or fluid. Now, I have started the process of purging Flash from every site that we operate, and manage for clients. What changed?

iOS.

It’s truly astounding how much web browsing is done on iPhones and iPads where Flash does not exist (Flash is also on the outs in the Android world). One of our clients has the majority of their web traffic driven by their weekly email newsletter – and I’ve seen the numbers, a very large fraction of people read their email on their phones and tablets. Today, it is critical that your website does not depend on Flash. It’s also a good idea to slowly remove Flash from non-critical parts of your website too.

Which leads to today’s subject. On many of Perceptus’ websites we use sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, which 5 or 8 years ago, was a great way to use nicer fonts on your website for headers. sIFR uses Flash. For some reason the most recent Google Chrome web browser broke some, but not all, of the sIFR headlines on print-bingo.com, our popular bingo card generator. It might be related to a missing  attribute or something relatively minor. But, rather than debug it, it was time to move to Javascript based fonts. On print-bingo.com, we’re now using Google Web Fonts.

Bye bye sIFR. You were a good thing for your day.

User Scripts Broken in Google Chrome?

Friday, December 11th, 2009

A little while ago my custom user script for Chrome stopped working. I’m currently using the “dev channel” at home. When I first switched to Chrome, that was the only version that supported user scripts (basically GreaseMonkey from FireFox integrated into Chrome).

My script is simple, it makes some font and color changes to a few websites that I view regularly to make them more legible (IMHO). I should bundle it into an extension some day…

Anyway, it took a bit of research to figure out what happened. Look here on the Google Chrome blog:

[r33013] Disable –enable-user-scripts. (Issue: 27520)
NOTE: You can now install user scripts by navigating to them. You will have to reinstall your current scripts (they aren’t migrated).

— http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2009/12/dev-channel-has-been-updated-to-4.html

So, scripts are still supported, but I have to install it again. I didn’t quite understand “navigating to them” meant, but it actually means exactly what it says. In the address bar browse the file system, e.g. go to here:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User Scripts

Then double click on your .JS file, and a little extension installation prompt pops up. It’s pretty cool actually.

Hmm… now that Google Chrome regular version supports extensions, I might be able to take myself off the dev channel.

Cross Browser Compatibility of TEXTAREA and Chrome, Firefox, and IE with CSS “white-space: nowrap;”

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Today, the Perceptus Web Tools got a minor upgrade to improve browser compatibility.

A company bought a  license to our unique Excel to SQL INSERT Commands tool for their internal, confidential, use.  Cool! We never expected tools.perceptus.ca to be a revenue generator… but it does have unique features.  After all, we wrote them because we couldn’t find another website that could do the task for us!

In the interest of delivering a nice package to our new licensee, we  noticed that many of the text mangling features did not work in Google  Chrome.  Chrome web browser was stripping line breaks and consolidating sequential “spaces”.  We then realized that the site was not working in Internet Explorer either. Whoops.  Well, it is a  site primarily for our own internal uses, after all.

We had discovered a browser compatibility issue that probably affects very few people. We want a textarea without any wrapping, because some features are based on copy and pasting large amounts of data from Excel – automatic text wrapping makes hard to read.

Our original, Firefox functional, Chrome and Internet Explorer non-functional, TEXTAREA used the following:

  • CSS: white-space: nowrap;
  • TEXTAREA attribute: WRAP=”OFF”

In Firefox, we got a nice blob of text that you can scroll horizontally displayed.  In IE7 and IE8?  All kinds of crazy.  “Enter” keys got replaced by some sort of special inline character, lines and spaces got trimmed or cut out.  Google Chrome stripped out line breaks and leading spaces, and other oddities.

Upon research, we learned that the “WRAP” attribute is not W3C approved.  Technically, it is not deprecated, but that’s because it never existed in the specifications. So we removed it and tried to use only CSS. We tried a few combinations of the overflow, white-space, and display CSS properties.  They didn’t work.

What did work?

No CSS at all.

If you view the source of the tools.perceptus.ca site and the corresponding CSS file, you will only see this:

<TEXTAREA NAME=”thetextROWS=”20COLS=”100WRAP=”OFF“>

This works as we wanted in all three web browsers.  It is officially non-standard.  But it works.

If someone would like to submit a CSS that will actually work, I’d love to see it.  But for now, I’m just going to keep complaining about how much web programming still stinks. Maybe the moral of the story is that thanks to Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome, every web site should be tested against at least one of the Webkit based browsers in addition to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Customizable Back to School Bingo Cards for 2009!

Friday, July 24th, 2009

It’s always caught me off guard… it’s already back to school time for some parts of North America.

So, for those whose summer break is already coming to an end, here’s a reminder of Print-Bingo.com’s template bingo design for Back to School Bingo.  It’s a great way to help ease kids back into the learning state of mind.  So, if you have a class of restless students, try our Back to School Bingo Cards.

You can customize our designs through your web browser, so you can do some prep work from home and finish it off at work.  It’s super flexible.

As always, printing a few cards is free at Print-Bingo.com.  Of course, we’re also happy if you decide to upgrade to Premium access for $10 to get the rest of our great bingo card printing features.