Browser issues with MediaWiki

See also: Wikipedia:Browser notes

This page is intended 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.

IE on MacOS 9
Internet Explorer 5 on Mac OS 9 displays Wikimedia pages badly, especially quotes.

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
Internet Explorer 6 deletes any page longer than 32k when saving.

Problems with editing
When editing, Firefox 2.x changes all non-breakable spaces (code 0xA0) to breakable spaces (code 0x20). This can lead to ugly-looking diff pages. Bugzilla entry. Fixed in 3.0+ versions.

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.

K-meleon (Mozilla)/Windows 95 Unicode characters replaced by '?'.
 * This happens on any browser that doesn't support unicode.

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)

Problems while selecting text
Internet Explorer 6/Windows 98

With Wikipedia Phase II (not Phase III), it's impossible to select part of text on every pages. But there are not problems of selection in input area while editing.

''According to the following text this has not been fixed in the Cologne Blue wikipedia "skin". You may like to check if this is your problem before reading any further. MrJones 18:37, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC) ''


 * Check the stylesheet; it may be using absolute positioning on bits where it doesn't really need it. This was discovered and fixed in phase 3 a while ago; the selection bug was triggered by the combination of using absolute positioning for the body text (actually the whole page was in an absolutely positioned div, rather pointless) and fixing the doctype so browsers wouldn't render in quirks mode. --Brion VIBBER 15:41, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I said a mistake ; I have this problem on Meta-Wikipedia too ...But, Meta-Wikipedia use Phase III now ? And I have not this problem on french Wikipedia which use Phase III. Oliezekat 16:13, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * It would really help if when people report bugs, they specify if they're using any non-standard options (such as the Cologne Blue or Nostalgia skins). Cologne Blue skin i still broken in this regard (it's broken in many ways, and no one has yet come forward to fix it). --Brion VIBBER 16:41, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry...You had solved my problem : it's Cologne Blue skin which cause this problem ! I never think this issue. :o. Oliezekat 16:52, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Character encoding
The meta wiki is now encoded as Unicode UTF-8 so that it can cleanly include pages and commentary in any language. (Actual display of any given language's characters depends on the fonts installed on your computer, of course!)

Note that some browsers have poor Unicode support and may, in addition to not displaying properly, damage non-ASCII characters during editing. Known problems include:
 * Opera 5.0 for Macintosh, and probably other OSs as well. (Opera 6.0 does have Unicode support; if you've used it please say if it works!)
 * Opera 6.04 for Windows works well. -- PE 21:50 Nov 15, 2002 (UTC)
 * Netscape 4.x
 * IE 5.0 (Mac)

Browsers known to be able to view and edit correctly include:
 * Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers (ex Netscape 6 and higher)
 * IE 5.5 (Win)

And with appropriate configuration:
 * Lynx if Unicode UTF-8 character set is selected in options. Proper display may require setting your terminal for Unicode.
 * Links if in graphics mode

Gecko and tables next to lists on RTL pages
In Gecko browsers (Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Epiphany etc.), with RTL pages, in certain cases where there is a table and a long list next to each other, an unneeded scroll bar is added and the list incorrectly moves way right, and overlaps the navigation and toolbox links. See for example the Hebrew entry for canine.

See a screen shot

This problem does not seem to be present in Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6, which I have just tested the aforementioned hebrew entry for canine on. Further testing is warranted, however.

This problem does not appear in the linked article under Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0 under Windows XP.

Display problem
My contribution to Wikipedia:Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Grammar title Display problems with this project page may be relevant here, regarding a possible Mozilla bug.

Displaying MathML
Few browsers support MathML, and MediaWiki still consider it as an experimental feature. Anyway W3C publishes a list of browsers and of browser plugins and extensions supporting MathML (with relative bugs).

Language support
There are issues with supporting languages like Lingala. It turns out that at this time Safari provides the best language support. Firefox and Chrome come second and third they show the content properly but not in the edit mode. Internet Explorer did a real poor job in the edit mode showing a character that was not selected. GerardM 02:27, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Issues when following links with IE 7.0
When opening some articles, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Browser_notes, a pop-up appears indicating:

File download - Security warning Do you want to save this file or find a program online to open it? Name: Wikipedia_Browser_notes Type: Unknown File Type, 20.4 KB From: en.wikipedia.org

[Find] [Save] [Cancel]

Clicking find, complains about a unknown Mime type application/x-gzip-compressed Save, I get the gziped article,

Most of the articles in wikpedia open correctly, but I detected that the ones that contain a colon cause this problem  (Never mind,  tried  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Colon_(punctuation) and this one open correctly, so not sure what causes the problem.

Security settings set at default, cache, cookies and temp files erased, and problem persists.

Something else that caught my attention, notice how browser notes have the icon for external sites, and talk colon does not:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Browser_notes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Colon_(punctuation)

Failure to load some wikipedia pages in IE 8
I (and several others) have noticed a serious problem with IE 8 loading some (but not most) wikipedia pages. Instead of the page loading, one gets a file download popup saying "do you want to save this file" etc. I have observed this from google search results, and from the links within pages (and from google cached pages). An example page that repeatedly produces this behaviour for me is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yury_Shulman. On the advice of experts, I disabled third party browser extensions in IE8, started my Vista Business machine in safe mode with networking, and then started IE8 with out add-ons, using a right click on the start menu icon. Exactly the same problem occurs.

If one chooses the option to find an application to run the downloaded file, windows (as always, it seems) does not find an application, but indicates that the mime type is "application/x-gzip-compressed". I am sure this is because wikipedia delivers pages in compressed form, but have no idea why they are not automatically decompressed. Anyhow, hopefully my annoying experiences have drawn attention to what appears to be an important browser compatibility problem. I wish I had never upgraded to IE8 (foolish me, I thought microsoft were capable of adequately alpha testing a major software release). 82.1.151.22 16:21, 17 May 2009 (UTC)