Safari & Internet Explorer fixes released

First off, Luke tells me that I should warn you that technical information lies ahead, so…

WARNING: Technical information lies ahead!

Now, on with the post…

The Internet Explorer bug fix we have just pushed out was the old “Operation Aborted” bug, where using JavaScript to modify the HTML structure whilst it is still being “drawn” causes Internet Explorer to throw a fit, and take you to its standard error page. Normally, this is fixed by putting a simple 55 millisecond pause on executing the code, and placing the code right before the closing tags in the HTML. However, in Facebook canvas pages, this is not so simple, as you cannot position your FBJS before the closing HTML tags. So your delay must be longer. We already had the delay at 500ms, but this still did not appear to be enough, so now it is set to a full 1 second. This seems to cure it for everyone we have talked to, but if it does not cure it for you, please let us know!

The Safari bug, and I was very surprised by this, was much worse, I think. It has to do with comparing variables - you can no longer say “if a is less than b” by writing “if (a<b)”, you must now write “if (a < b)” - note the white-space surrounding the “<”. I call this the “Safari white-space bug,” not to be confused with the “Internet Explorer white-space bug” which we have already had issues with! The FBJS used by Blog Friends has been updated so that all the comparison operators are surrounded by a space on each side; and this appears to have fixed this issue. If you find it has not fixed the issues for you, please do tell us! That is, if you choose to use Safari… Personally, I am a Firefox fan, and we have had, to my knowledge, no Firefox-specific bugs with Blog Friends so far. If you do choose to use Safari 3, perhaps this post may change your mind…

On an unrelated note, I found this post by Chris Garrett on the Firefox plug-in “Read it Later” that I would like to share with you. Like Chris, I open loads of tabs whilst browsing the web, intending to read them when I get a chance. Unfortunately this practice pushes Firefox’s already bloated memory usage through the roof. Having 6GB of RAM in your workstation helps here… but this plug-in alleviates the need to have so many tabs open in the first place! I hope you find it as useful as I have started to.

Happy Blog Friend-ing!