Interesting Browser Issues

I have run into a few interesting browser issues over the past few days.

On Sunday my Mom decided she wanted to print this Blog out so she could take it up and show my Dad. She was printing from Firefox and found that it only printed three pages, all of which were missing most of the Blog. So I launched Firefox myself and sure enough, the first page would print the Title then the second page the Table of Contents and other stuff on the left side and the third page would print the first page of the Blog body of text. So I decided to print Preview in IE where it showed up perfectly. I then tried Netscape's Browser with the same results as Firefox, which shouldn't be too surprising; since the latest Netscape Browser is just a modified version of Firefox now. Opera did a pretty good job in the Print Preview, but I have become accustomed to IE7's Shrink to fit so the extra page with almost nothing on it makes me cringe, and for some reason it was set to print the backgrounds by default. It's a simple task to turn off print backgrounds but it would have used allot of ink. What my Mom eventually ended up doing was opening the page in IE6 and printing it that way. It worked for her.

If I were to venture a guess Firefox simply doesn’t know how to handle printing IFrames properly.

Now, Ie7 isn't perfect either. I have been experiencing this rather frustrating phenomenon while looking on-line for jobs. I would go to a page of Jobs and middle click a few links, that look like Jobs I could do, to open them in separate tabs, then go to the next page and then look over the Jobs in the other Tabs. If it is a Job I am definitely not qualified for I would close the tab and continue to the next until I am through the tabs and then come back to the page with the lists of jobs and repeat the process. After doing that for a while IE7 would suddenly close all instances of IE open and play the error sound. There isn't even an error reporting dialog, it just closes.

I decided yesterday that I would trace down the problem. I noticed that it happened on opening the new tab, and it seemed to have something to do with the number of tabs opened. So I opened an IE window and clicked the New Tab button until it crashed. I counted 55 Tabs including the original tab created. Then I started over again this time I clicked the New Tab button and then Double Clicked the newly created tab to close it. Doing it this way I counted 62 Tabs, including the first tab, before it crashed. I tried several more times to make sure I could reproduce it consistently, which it did, unfortunately I don't have another Machine with Windows XP on it, to see if it is a problem with my machine, or with something that is installed or whatever.

The only ideas I have as to what the problem could be; is that there is a possibility that there is a variable not being reduced when a tab is closed so that it overflows. Or that the tabs are kept in memory until there are simply too many open and once again an overflow occurs.

Update: 21 Feb 2007 9:00PM, I finaly attached WinDBG to IE and caught the exception. It seems that it has to do with the IE Dev toolbar. It is trowing an access violation error. Interesting.