iosart blog

Several interesting issues I’ve encountered while developing the PlainOldFavorties extension: Mozilla cannot correctly handle filenames that contain Unicode characters (on Windows). See bug 162361 for more details. Unicode issues seem to haunt many products and frameworks, and as I found out, Mozilla is no exception. If this is issue is important to you (and if […]

Right now there is no support in the Firefox Extension Manager for running a script when the extension is uninstalled. Such script might be useful if your extension needs to perform some clean up, like removing some temporary files or registry entries. I’ve managed to find a work around for this: Install an unload event […]

Update: Bug 253742 is very close to being fixed, so the workarounds in this post will no longer be needed. Thanks to the Mozilla developers for making the platform even better. Every Firefox extension consists of several parts. It often has a UI part, typically written in XUL and some scripts typically written in Javascript. […]

Update: This issue (bug 252543) has been solved in Mozilla, so the workaround is no longer needed. I have written a Firefox extension which uses an XPCOM component. When the extension is installed and the user will try to install a newer version of the extension, the installation fails. The reason for the failure is […]

My online photo galleries show thumbnails of the photographs for every folder. Sometimes after reloading a gallery page some of the off-screen thumbnails weren’t rendered – only a gray rectangle appeared instead of the image. Hovering over the thumbnail revealed the correct image. The thumbnails have a filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(…) CSS style applied to them which means […]

I have noticed that several HTML pages change their layout wildly while loading in the browser. Apparently, this behavior was caused by images at the top of the problematic pages. The image was added using JavaScript: document.writeln(“<IMG SRC=…>”);. Internet Explorer didn’t like that – it had problems determining the correct page layout while loading, so […]

Tweaking with the Apache configuration, I encountered some pretty interesting problems. I used mod_rewrite to serve different content based on the HTTP request. Basically, what I was trying to do is this: there are two domains, “one.com” and “two.com” both pointing to the same server. If the user used the first domain name in the […]

DHTML – using a floated DIV followed by a <DIV STYLE=”clear:both;”> causes some strange behavior in IE6 – a large portion of the page disappears and reappears randomly after refresh and/or mouse hover. What was happening is that the above configuration brought out a bug in IE6 and it drew the (white) background OVER the […]

A release build of a MFC application crashes, while the Debug build works fine. The crash analysis shows that the stack has been overwritten and thus destroyed. Further analysis reveals that the crash occurs inside a ::SetWindowText call in a CEdit sub-classed object. This shouldn’t be my code, right? Wrong. What was happening is that […]