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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

You know, what's great about this new web and these new methods of laying out UI is this: before, content arrived to your browser, and sometimes if you were using a slightly older browser or one which wasn't really tested it'd look somewhat wrong. Useable, but wrong.

Nowadays, it looks like this: http://imgur.com/a/Z7IXu

I'm slightly wary about the future considering these improvements, since we're talking about a page displaying an alternation of a bit of text and an image, a bit of text and an image, ... which I used to believe was something we'd come get right.

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> Nowadays, it looks like this: http://imgur.com/a/Z7IXu

What browser is that in? It looks like a weird bug is showing there, potentially an exploitable one since some of that looks like garbage pixel data, like it's reading from invalid memory. That seems to be the issue here, not that web content isn't like the "old days" when it always worked but was sometimes wrong.

Speaking of which, there never were any "old days" that I can remember. Often sites only worked in IE, not just rendered properly but also only worked. You couldn't enter data into forms, or couldn't get them to submit properly. The web wasn't just a little incorrectly rendered in the IE days, it was totally broken on many sites.

> What browser is that in?

Camino, which uses FF 3.6's engine.

The FF 3.6 engine is very outdated at this point, and there are a lot of known exploits. Unless Camino has been doing their own security work, but I assume not. I'd recommend upgrading.

Fuck Tesla; it's not fair those cars get to run on electricity.

Congratulation on having produced the "complete failure car analogy" of this thread, and thank you for your contribution.

is the ff3.6 engine still usable for more than half the web?

As far as I can browse, it's usable for about 99% of the web still. 99% of the one I visit anyway. Although Camino itself does have issues when site javascript locks up and 150-or-so tabs are open.

Looking at the source for the page, the HTML is clean and there is nothing particularly fancy or out of the ordinary about the CSS. It does use semantic HTML (menu, section, nav, etc.), but that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm really curious as to what browser that is, seems like you have triggered some weird bug.

It works perfect on Firefox Nightly. And in fact, they state on the top of the page that you should use Nightly.

I (sort of) understand the argument, but it does feel kind of out of place since the specific objective of that page is providing guidance on building UI for a specific mobile platform that is build using a modern browser at its core :/

What's the browser?

I would suggest using a modern browser, it looks fine in FF 18.

I think you missed his point about how content shouldn't turn into a garbled mess of nonsense pixels just because your browser happens to be 3 months old.

Being 3 months old does not explain nonsense pixels. That's a serious bug in whatever browser the commenter is using - possibly an exploitable one since it got the browser to read from a wrong memory address.

True, but undefined behaviour is undefined behaviour, which is probably what's being triggered here. You can't really expect it to always be "slightly messed up but usable."

They're probably using some new APIs and didn't consider degradation at all.

Hah, I had the same problem using latest Debian Iceweasel browser to look that page. It almost filled up my 32G of Ram and crashed too.

Outdated Google Chrome displayed it perfectly, hell even Lynx did a better job than iceweasel

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