Browser issues with MediaWiki

This page is intendend to document problems with certain web browsers in editing Wikipedia articles. If you have experiences with a specific web browser, please add them here.

Some of these problems may be bugs, some of them may be user interface annoyances, and some of them may result from incorrect or unexpected implementation of certain features on the Wikipedia site. If you find bugs in your browser, this is not the place to report them, but if they are relevant to Wikipedia, they may as well be listed here.

Problem with newlines:
Some browsers seem to insert newlines into entries. This is likely to be a CR/LF problem (Windows ends lines with CR/LF, Unix only with LF), and to mostly show up during collaborative editing as in Wikis. Specifically, Opera 5.x on Linux seems to have this problem, although further tests are needed. Opera 6.0?


 * s/\r\n/\n/sg

Problems with saving:
Opera 5.x on Linux definitely has issues with saving pages. Sometimes, a page will simply not be stored and the browser will hang. Opera 6.0 on Windows seems to save fine.

Mozilla 0.9.9 has problems saving forms (such as wikipedia edits!) longer than about 10k; the connection stalls and the page is not saved. Use an older or newer version without the bug.

Problems with editing:
Mozilla (0.96) has some quite annoying bugs in textareas. These relate to cursor behavior and scrollbar display. On the other hand, it supports saving form data, which is quite handy for long articles.


 * See http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?NetscapeTextWrappingBug. This bug has been around since the first version of the browser.

Netscape 4.7/Windows 98 Occasionally refuses to allow insertion into longer articles.

Internet Explorer 5/Mac OS X (and perhaps older?) Textarea seems to be limited to about 32k; text cannot be inserted into longer pages, instead met with an indignant beep.

Opera 5/Mac OS X (and perhaps older?) Textarea is limited to about 32k; text is truncated after that point. Inserting additional text results in the end of the text scrolling off into la-la land, though someone editing the middle of a page might not notice; if the page is saved, it will be truncated.

K-meleon (Mozilla)/Windows 95 Unicode characters replaced by '?'.

Note: 32kb limits Textarea was limited to 32kb in both Netscape 3 and MSIE 3, presumably on all platforms for which those browsers were respectively available. In neither case does the browser warn of a buffer overflow. (I am not sure about the version 4 browsers - an experiment might be needed)