UPDATE: 3/11 see the experiment I’m trying above.
In the last couple of days, I’ve gotten several notes from people complaining they have trouble reading WUWT. See sample provided by a reader at left. It seems to make some posts go all caps and small washed out font.
I have no control over this as I’m hosted on the free wordpress.com web service and they constantly upgrade their platform with the latest updates. I suspect some recent upgrade has created a browser incompatibility with older browsers.
Again, I have no control over this, but I do have suggestions.
I’ve traced the problem I believe, so let me offer what I think is a solution. If you are one of those folks that refuses to upgrade from ancient browsers like IE6 and run on 512MB of memory on XP service pack 1, then there’s nothing I can do to help you.
The problem seems centric to IE8 and Windows XP systems, though does seem to show up slightly on IE8 with Windows 7.
I run Firefox, latest version, and never see any of the issues described. I also run Chrome, latest version with no trouble. May I suggest readers having problems try these?
The latest version of Java might also help, as would be upgrades to latest service packs and patches, etc. if you have not done so. Older machines running Windows XP would also benefit from browser upgrades, and would run better especially if you can increase RAM memory. What typically happens in large posts with a lot of comments is that the user can’t load it all due to memory limitations. I’ve found that 2GB RAM in Windows XP is the sweet spot. Memory is cheap these days, and is your best bank for buck performance upgrade.
While it would be nice if I had complete control over all the web elements and server side things, it would mean I’d have even less time for myself since I’d have to manage my own server, and then I’d be having posts on BOTS and HTAcess like Lucia has been doing lately. The trade off given the traffic volume that WUWT handles is more than worth a few upgrade glitches than can be solved by keeping up with the latest browsers and OS patches. This is why we moved Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit off a private server to wordpress.com, because keeping CA up and running on high traffic was difficult.
Of course if somebody has solved the problem themselves by some other means I have not thought of, please advise.
Thanks for your consideration – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Back to compatibility
This is not a client-side problem and also not a stylsheet problem. The effect occurs, if a open-tag is not closed properly closed in the content. The same can happen with not closed italic, bold, lowercase, and so on…
I run IE AND Firefox AND Chrome on several different computers (always the latest version). At the moment I use mainly Chrome because the last time I checked it loaded big files like Google maps/streetview faster than the othe two, and I like the printing routine.
While all three synchronise bookmarks/favorites with their siblings via internet, I use “Transmute” to have the same favorites/bookmarks on all machines and all browsers.
This has nothing to do with the compatibility button.
Here is a solution: Most of the time (if not all the time) a simple refresh fixes the problem (at least temporarily).
The issue seems to have something to do with the googleadservices image being displayed.
I demonstrated this by repeatedly refreshing and taking a screenshot each time. What I found after making multiple screenshots is that the googleadservices image usually changes with every screen refresh but occasionally it tries to display an image that does not display properly and then it corrupts the font for all of the following text on the page.
And this is why a simple screen refresh will usually work: it causes a different googleadservices image to be displayed and simultaneously resolves the font problem.
I don’t have those problems, probably because I use the firefox plug-in ‘NoSquint’ which allows me to set font sizes and colours per site if needed, and it also sets a global policy for appearance which is working far better than the built in preferences.
You can choose between just enlarging the font, or scaling up the entire page.
It’s very handy, whether you’re myopic or not, see here: https://urandom.ca/nosquint/
Anthony… looking through WordPress’s CSSs used in your pages and there is a loose “;” that Visual Studio says is an illegal character even in CSS 2.1 verifier. May not be the problem… but it might. Would depend on how long that glitch has been there. See:
“s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/post-flair/style.css?m=1331331746g&ver=3” file at the second occurance of the CSS entry “#wpl-mustlogin a”. The loose semicolon is just before this entry. There are some others but most I see should just be ignored but the browsers if they don’t recognize the attributes (most are on shadowed text and such).
I run XP at 2GB with IE8 with nary a problem but being a programmer with little time to mess with a lot of other software I do keep my machine lean, mean, and always with the latest updates.
As someone who does quite a bit of HTML and a lot on wordpress platforms, writing for IE in any version is a biatch. Microsodt continues to rewirte standards to its own liking, and you forever have to come up with code work-arounds for displays that work in everybody else’s browser, but display poorly in IE. WordPress is especially sensitive to the div tag pair, and it strips a lot of code out of otherwise compatible html. This is problematic. If you’re cutting and pasting “whole code” into the wordpress editor, you might have to cycle through the preview a few times with multiple browsers to see if everything behaved, then go into the raw HTML editor and clean it up. This can be tricky when editing pasted copy.
Font size issues are a nuisance because there so many ways they can be driven into the interpreter. H tags, and font size= tags and certain CSS command sets may not be compatible together, especially if the user is using browser settings for size control. Not all combinations are happy when matched against the native resolution of the video driver.
I’m not much impressed with Chrome, especially so since Google decided to upgrade from occasionally pillaging to full time pillaging of your hardware. Firefox, while my default browser for years, is beginning to suffer from “netscape bloat” and is starting to drift too far from its roots. That said, I have one XP3 box still running FF3 (happily I might add) – most of my others are running FF7 – Its been fun watching FF keep throwing out version upgrades faster than I can get around upgrading. (I run a 5 machine network and between upgrades and backups, there’s not much actual machine time left for client side fun :). I started seeing IE compatibility issues with IE7, but rarely use it now – I think most of my machines are on IE 8 or 9? The one good thing I can say about IE ist that it has a superior image viewer compared to firefox.
.
I have an ancient machine with Ubuntu & Opera. It works fine except it is slow. (Just updated to ancient from prehistoric for $50 USD)
W7 w Chrome. Blog is fine. However, there are many many out there which seem to believe that a pale grey typeface on a white background is easy to read. Only if you are over 40, only if you have 20/20 sight, folks. Also, it seems that it is de rigeur to have the smallest possible typeface as well. Sure, you can expand it, but…
I point out that there is a good reason books are printed in BLACK and white.
Ummm, ignore most of the advice in this thread’s comments. This is most certainly not a client side problem! When something suddenly occurs on multiple client computers with differing configurations (OS, browsers), where the odds of them all having somehow screwing their systems up at the same time and in the exact same way are infinitesimal, the answer lies on the server side. Since Climate Audit is also affected that rules out anything specific either there or at WUWT. What do they have in common? WordPress.
The only thing that can temporarily convert the appearance of a webpage that contains normal mixed-case text to something else (lowercase or upper case) is a CSS style sheet Text-Transform property. There is a high probability that WordPress is simply changing their global CSS style sheets and made an error. Most likely it only affects MSIE because of all the manual kludges (browser specific branching) that these ‘programmers’ insert into style sheets (and/or javascript branching code to pull in specific styles), this is done to account for rendering differences between all the browsers. Personally I think that stuff should never have been done, instead webpages should have been written browser neutral forcing each browser to catch up or die, but I digress.
It is very bad debugging practice for people to jump right in when a bug surfaces and then start radically changing configurations on the client side (computers, browsers, fonts, settings …). This only masks a usually simple problem. You’re supposed identify symptoms and reduce to the common denominator, not fly off half-cocked. People with blogs hosted on WordPress should be gathering specific data from their readers who have this problem and especially when it is reproducible. This information then needs to go straight to WordPress. There is no way that they are going to let a bug stand that affects MSIE, no way.
Finally, there is no reason that people should be a slave to one browser. This nonsense about ‘switch to xxx’ is ridiculous. I have icons right in front of me for Opera, Firefox, Chrome and MSIE. They all happily co-exist. Often times you may want to use them simultaneously. When a bug shows up, you have other browsers to fall back on! You have free choice, why not use it?
I thought I was going crazy a couple days ago when fonts started changing. Thank goodness…
Changing fonts seems to cause a visceral response in people — me too.
With Firefox, if I experiment with the advanced font sizes & types, and toggle the “Allow pages to use their own fonts” option, I can get it to acceptable views, tho still not quite the same. More experimenting in order…
On a few sites like Roy Spencer’s site, I have to change the View/Page Style to “No style” instead of “Basic page style” to view all the comments.
Good move to let WordPress.com do your hosting. It is world class, and they take care of their customers. As to the browser, if people think they are avoiding problems by using an older browser like IE6, they are severely mistaken.
Like you, I use the latest Firefox and Chrome. IE9 is turning out to be a good product, too. If somebody is still running XP with a gig or so of memory, they are probably OK. If they cannot afford to upgrade to Windows 7, a very good system, then they need to consider changing to Linux.
There is no need to consider a Mac, unless they have too much money this month. It doesn’t buy any advantages, at all.
Microsoft is focusing on HTML 5, so there will never ever again be compatibility problems.
It is also a next generation platform that WUWT (and WordPress) really needs to be upgraded to for various reasons such as interactive graphics.
A good article that helps explain why this technology is important, and the future, can be found here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh335062.aspx
My Smartphone (Windows Phone), my BlackBerry PlayBook, and of course my desktop computer (Windows 7/8, IE9/10) all support HTML 5.
You also no longer need adobe flash and you can play video without a plug in.
I am not an html / web programmer, I am an app developer who started programming in the early 1980s with Fortran, then Modula 2, C, C++ and C#. And I don’t like Java. So some of my info on web stuff could be wrong.
It comes and goes on a range of computers and systems. Usually disappears if you refresh.
I was surprised to be told that I was running an old system, since I only bought this, my first computer, three years ago. I suppose that’s a long time in computing! Anyway, I have downloaded IE9 and some of the WUWT threads are ok and some are still washed out. I suppose I’ll have to wait a day or two and see how new threads work out.
On posting my last comment at 8:00 the damn thing switched into ‘washed-out’ mode! I left WUWT and immediately fired it up again and now it’s ok. I don’t get this.
Thanks for all the tips herein.
Hopefully the possibilities and findings illuminated here will illustrate to anyone developing or purchasing software the necessity of Keeping It Simple for Success. Users of WordPress should communicate that to WordPress, though I acknowledge it is difficult to persuade the provider of a n/c service.
Perhaps more donations would faciitate Anthony being able to run WordPress on his own server to have control over version of SW thus revert until WordPress fixes the bugs with a new version.
Blade is right. The common denominator in all these problems is WordPress. WP constantly diddles with it’s software, sometimes causing problems in the process. It’s like never ending beta software. Complaints made to: http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact might help resolve this problem.
A suggestion for users is to Refresh (F5 or View|Refresh (ALT V R in sequence) in MSIE8. Beware you may have to do that more than once, I’ve seen it make things worse.
I’ve also seen part of a page normal and the rest
The font appears to be Verdana, a common one on the Internet, but the problem is faintness not font, the fainteness comes from the font colour being gray not black (which is usually the default but who knows what web weenies are doing).
Using IE9 may or may not be wise, I’d have to investigate what it actually is intended to do – last I heard it had a different orientation than previous versions, and wait for bugs to be fixed.
Generally speaking, I am averse to software upgrades due to the poor track record of developers, especially third parties like WordPress. A key problem is the “two-year-old-and-the-hammer” syndrome of adding gimmicks instead of solidifying basic code. Graphics is a common area of playing around – look at the myriad of fonts in Windows alone.
Many organizations clung to Windows XP due stability and compatibility with custom software, but Windows 7 should be better than Vista for those attributes.
Users should be upgrading to SP3 which is n/c, and keeping Windows Update up to date, I’d be surprised that many regular visitors to WUWT have SP1 that Anthoney mentionned.
I’m running XP Home SP3 with 1Gb RAM on a 6 year old laptop. WUWT is fine with Firefox 10.0.2 and Palemoon (a Firefox clone) 3.6.30. Also OK (but rather washed out text) in IE8. However, when I use IE Tab within Firefox I get the tiny font in the comments that others are complaining about.
Oddly enough, I’m banning connections that leave user agents for really ancient browsers. I mean stuff from 1995!
I think some of the bot farms are operated by people who got a hold of really, really old pc’s, installed really old web browsers and write a script to crawl around and leave spam. I’ve periodically banned real people (especially in the UK owing to their networking system) — but I have yet to find a real person who is reading blogs using a 1995 machine!
BTW: I am setting up a page for people to unban themselves tomorrow.
Identical to others with problems: “I run Windows 7 with IE9 and all the latest updates . Several days ago on Win7 IE9 I did experience the symptoms that others have noted.”
Agreed that is was the posts from commenters that were in small caps. That was true even 3 hours ago. This page looks normal.
I experienced the “font” problem regularly with IE8, never with Firefox on the same machine, updated everything… MS has had ongoing problems with the renderer, updated numerous times over the years
IE8 is behaving itself now that you have turned off the GoogleAds, my guess would be that it’s been an IE8 problem.
Thanks for WUWT, best read.
I have a WordPress.com blog, and have never had a problem with people reading my posts or comments. But, I don’t even get a fraction of the traffic Anthony gets. For those not familiar with WordPress, there are two versions.
First, there is the WordPress.com version where you sign up for a free account, choose your theme, and let the WP people host it. WordPress.com hosts over 400,000 sites, and generally delivers world class service.
Secondly, the most popular WordPress software is available for download on WordPress.org. You download the software, and then upload it to the hosting company you choose. Most larger hosting companies will install it for you along with the necessary MySQL database application.
The difference is that when you use the “.org” software, you have an almost infinite degree of freedom to customize the core software and theme in any way you want. Most developers will go this route to give their clients a site customized to their requirements.
Anthony has hosted his own server. With the traffic he receives, management of the site and bandwidth can become problematic. He has been at WordPress.com for a while now, and I have never had a problem with his site.
As someone mentioned, if there is a font problem,it may be in the WP CSS files. Maybe if Anthony experiments with a different theme the problem would disappear, but with his traffic, this could be a disaster.
The latest software trend on the web is to design sites that are responsive sites, i.e., sites that change their presentation for best effect on either PC., tablet computers, or smart phones. Many WordPress.com themes now have this feature built in. So, implementing responsive web features with CSS3 and HTML5 could be messing with someone’s fonts. I would not be surprised.
That said, I use alternately a dual core laptop with FF and Chrome, a Dell desktop with quad-core i7 processor using FF and Chrome, and a Kindle Fire tablet. What’s Up With That looks fine on all of those devices.
You cannot say with certainty that the problem rests totally with the server since a high percentage of users have no problem. The age old problem of different browsers rendering differently makes more sense.
No trouble with fonts but over the last week or so I’ve been getting a very annoying pop-up that takes the whole screen. The only cure I’ve found is to refresh. I’m on Safari 4.1.3.