Netscape 6.2 rendering bug

animated GIF + transparency

[tedster]

My Netscape 6.2 messes up animated gifs with transparency - the transparent places are rendered in opaque colors, which makes for extreme ugliness. Nasty little bug.

Where is the problem coming from? Does Gecko do this? I've ignored it so far (0.5% of visitors you know) but should I worry about AOL 8.0?

[Duckula]

Gecko doesn't do this, since Mozilla 0.9.9 renders gif transparency correctly. If i'm allowed to guess, the trouble is caused by linking against an equivalent of libungif.so without transparency support, and recompiling and relinking would solve the issue.

So, about the next AOL, you may as well wait and see.

[papabaer]

I haven't noticed the animated .gif issue, though I admit, I primarily use Netscape 6.2 for testing and seldom surf with it. But Tedster's anomaly is a good springboard to broach something I have noticed with Mozilla.

On larger, graphic intensive pages, I have experienced numerous instances with Mozilla 0.99, where Moz has a tendency to "lose" previously rendered images. This happens when I scroll down the page and then scroll back to the top; previously rendered images are no longer displayed. Refreshing the page restores the images but this is NOT a behavior that is acceptable.

I have also experienced several occasions where iframe content is only partially rendered by Mozilla. Again, refreshing the page usually pulls in the abandoned content.

When I am in "full bore testing mode" I have Opera6, IE6, NS6.2 and Mozilla 0.99 all "blessing" the same sites. Because of the draw-in issues I have witnessed with Mozilla, I have been doing a bit more comparison testing between browsers.

I already am familiar with Opera's little quirk where if you "move back" to a previously rendered page that contained an iframe, Opera sometimes will not display the iframe content without a "refresh." That is a minor issue, I am more concerned with Mozilla losing images that scroll offscreen.

I am curious: what, if any, quirks or anomalies have been witnessed by anyone else?

I am surfing using a Windows 98 PC w/128mb ram and a DSL connection.

[Duckula]

Well, I can't say that any image has fully disappeared on me, and I've used mozilla all the 9.x series. But there is a glitch that may be related: as told, the whole image never disappears on my browser. But while scrolling, sometimes thin stripes of the graphic show as white.

That behavior is related to something that was called "libpr0n" around of 0.9.3; it gives me trouble no more, but was a nasty glitch back then.

But well, my system is a linux box and that may be a windows-only glitch. The thin white stripes disappear redrawing the window as in switching viewports, no need of a refresh. Does minimize and restore make the images show again? Or pushing the mouse cursor as if selecting the graphic?

Can you please make or point to a test case?

Added: If the images return, the cause *may* be the one throughly discussed on bugzilla, bug #83289 "Some images get background-color lines/stripes when scrolled"

(edited by: Duckula at 4:04 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2002)

[papabaer]

I get the "thin white stripes" also, though these seem to be when Moz is trying to draw-in iframe content.

Minimze and restore will pull the images back. Interesting... could this be a result of attempting to streamline the rendering engine and perhaps going a bit too far?