228238 - 190+ comments causes table-based layout to break very bad

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Layout: Tables, defect)

Description

[Chris Gonyea]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031015 Firebird/0.7 (aebrahim)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031015 Firebird/0.7 (aebrahim)

http://www.forclark.com/ has a General Discussion thread that is recreated every
300 comments, with the old thread archived. The page displays properly when
there is less then 190-200 comments on the page. As soon as there are approx.
190-200 comments, the layout breaks horribily causing the background image to
appear ontop of the rest of the comments on the web page and the right sidebar
to move from the top right of the page to the bottom of the page. This happens
every single time a thread goes over 190+ comments. Also page rendering
performance is horrible when this happens, requiring 5-10 seconds to render the
page and it freezes the browser as well until the rendering is complete. IE
renders the page flawlessly and with 190+ comments renders in seconds.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to this archived General Discussion page:
http://chat.forclark.com/story/2003/12/11/145132/09/
2. Notice the very logn page rendering times, 5-10 seconds at least.
3. When page is done loading, scroll down until you notice the blue background
over text.

Actual Results:  
Rendering times are unbearable. The blue background image appears over the text,
making it impossible to read the text of the comments and breaking the layout in
places at the same time. Also the right sidebar that usually appears at the top
of the page now appears at the very bottom of the page.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should render the page in a reasonable amount of time, with the proper
layout, right sidebar in the upper right hand side of the page, and the blue
background not ontop of the text.

A random page that has the correct layout and none of the problems:
http://jdavidson.forclark.com/story/2003/12/11/23398/226

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

In firebird 0.7 the pages renders correctly. I agree it takes time to render.

Comment 2

[Lorenzo Colitti]

URL WFM Firebird 20031120 (Linux). Page load is slow, but I can't see the
background image on top of the text. The build you are using is two months old,
have you tried a more recent one?

Comment 3

[Olivier Cahagne]

wfm 20031213 Win2k on a 900MHz laptop, it took 1 or 2 seconds to render page.
Please try again with Mozilla 1.6b or latest nightly firebird build. Perhaps
related fixes: bug 226938, bug 227458.

Comment 4

[Robert Accettura [:raccettura]]

Reporter:  What are your system specs?

Please try with 1.5/+

I'm trying it on a 1.8GHz P4M laptop, on 2003121308, and it takes about 2
seconds to retrieve over the network.  It displays in the same amount of time. 
Can't see how that could get faster unless my connection got better.  Loads the
same in IE.

I'm guessing you lack RAM, or have a very slow CPU, as that would do it.  I
would expect my 233MHz Apple G3 to hang for a few moments on a page that size.

For the record, the page is 371.9 KB (380826 bytes).  That's a pretty
substantial sized page.

Comment 5

[Chris Gonyea]

I think I found the problem. I created a new user account in order to see if
this bug would show up and noticed that there were no layout problems with that
particular page. Curious, I went onto the Display Preferences page on that web
site and reset them to the default (what they would be when an account is first
created). I noticed that the fonts were smaller then what they were originally
for me and that this fixed the layout problem. Kinda strange because I don't
remember ever changing the font sizes.

I'm all set, thanks anyways for the help!

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Sounds like possible 16-bit widget issues...

Comment 7

[Bernd]

wfm winxp 2004092206 reporter do you still see this bug?

Comment 8

[Bernd]

no response from reporter, marking wfm