Display problem in Safari 1.3

April 16, 2005 7:54 AM

In Safari 1.3 the background of the top nav panel on AskMe is in MeTa grey rather than green.
posted by bonaldi to Bugs at 7:54 AM (25 comments total)

Did you just upgrade to OS X 10.3.9? (now Safari shows it is 1.3 (v312). I did yesterday and see the same Safari today now that you mention it. The update had some tinkering in Safari which broke Pithhelmet but allegedly made more site accessible .

Then again, it might have been that way for a while and I didn't notice.
posted by birdherder at 8:44 AM on April 16, 2005

Click on the AskMe logo and open the gif it in a new window. It's gray, chief. #7F7F7F
posted by planetkyoto at 9:31 AM on April 16, 2005

Eh? The logo looks fine here, nice and green. It's the bar with "Ask Metafilter home Metafilter MetaTalk" on it that's knackered.
posted by bonaldi at 9:36 AM on April 16, 2005

Oops. Thought you meant the top part of the navbar, the gray stripes on white. Too late for me to be commenting. Sorry.
posted by planetkyoto at 9:47 AM on April 16, 2005

can you get the image details? what is the url? is it http://ask.metafilter.com/images/gray_lines.gif ?
posted by andrew cooke at 10:10 AM on April 16, 2005

(which you would do by right clicking on the nav panel where there's no link, i would guess - in firefox i found an option to view the bg image and then, once that was displayed, another option to show image properties)
posted by andrew cooke at 10:12 AM on April 16, 2005

i wonder if it's a browser bug - perhaps it's caching images by resolved ip address rather than dns name?
posted by andrew cooke at 10:13 AM on April 16, 2005

I have two Macs, one I've updated, one I haven't, and they both look the same, and the same as in Firefox.
posted by cillit bang at 10:24 AM on April 16, 2005

I don't see it: Safari (v312), Firefox (v1.0.2), Opera.
posted by sbutler at 10:25 AM on April 16, 2005

Just so we're clear, it looks like this to me.

This is essentially a clean install on this mac, and I've reset Safari too.
posted by bonaldi at 10:30 AM on April 16, 2005

the url? did you flush the image cache and reload?
posted by andrew cooke at 10:34 AM on April 16, 2005

bonaldi, i just experienced the same problem and followed andrew cooke's advice. I reset Safari, emptied the cache, relogged in, and now everything looks fine.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 10:38 AM on April 16, 2005

x-post: sbutler, hmm, thanks for them. Would you mind trying logging in, and clicking "ask metafilter" from the MetaTalk page, which is how I get there.

Andrew Cooke: I checked the URL in the view source window, and I'm getting this:
[tr]
[td width="100%" background="/images/gray_lines.gif" height="53" colspan="2" valign="top"]

Which I guess is the problem. WTF?
posted by bonaldi at 10:38 AM on April 16, 2005

shit, now my metatalk bar is green. AskMeFi is fixed, though. What the hell.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 10:39 AM on April 16, 2005

if you now have green in askme, do you see green in meta?

it looks like matt is using the same relative name for the background in meta and askme (both images are called gray_lines.gif), but he's using the host name to decide which actual image to give you (if your browser asks for ask.metafilter.com/images/gray_lines.gif you get the green image, if it asks for metatalk.metafilter.com/images/gray_lines.gif you get the grey image).

in your case, for some reason, that's not working. my guess is that the browser decided ask.me... and metatalk.me... were the same site, and so assumed it would get the same image back, so didn't bother asking. which is a bug in the browser.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:42 AM on April 16, 2005

(ie instead of asking again, it used the already cached image from the other site name. and presumably it thinks the two sites are the same because the names resolve to the same ip address.)
posted by andrew cooke at 10:48 AM on April 16, 2005

in some cases that will be a pretty serious bug. either we've got it wrong or they'll issue a patch pdq.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:49 AM on April 16, 2005

that sounds v. plausible. Considering they also broke my Java install, OS Xrs beware 10.3.9.
posted by bonaldi at 10:50 AM on April 16, 2005

Okay, I see it now. You do have to switch between AskMe and MeTa (and whichever one you visited first seems to govern the image you get). However, it is only these two... I can't get it to fail between MeFi and the others. Anyone?

Couple things: putting the URLs in directly (http://metatalk.metafilter.com/images/gray_lines.gif and http://ask.metafilter.com/images/gray_lines.gif) brings up the correct image each time, even if within the page it fails. Also, an Ethereal dump shows that Safari isn't even asking for the image. Even when I hold down SHIFT wile pressing reload it still uses its cached versions (does this combination even force a refresh in Safari?).

I agree with others: this looks like a Safari caching bug. But I don't know what makes MeFi proper work when the others break.
posted by sbutler at 11:10 AM on April 16, 2005

... and I see what MeFi isn't borked too. Matt uses a completely different way to specify the background image.
posted by sbutler at 11:16 AM on April 16, 2005

All right. With my limited technical experience, I agree with you andrew. I turned off my computer and came back just now and i went to MeTa first to check the status of this thread. I then went to AskMeFi, which is again grey.

10.3.9 is indeed causing problems. After a mishap like this, I'm beginning to reconsider Windows XP.




Yeah...right.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 12:16 PM on April 16, 2005

I have the same problem after installing 10.4 & using Safari 2.0.
posted by travis vocino at 2:34 PM on April 16, 2005

it looks like matt is using the same relative name for the background in meta and askme

ROFLs
posted by quonsar at 3:02 PM on April 16, 2005

shit, i see it too. just updated to 10.3.9. and my firefox is crashing.

updates are always funny, huh?
posted by fungible at 5:43 PM on April 16, 2005

I'm getting this too, in Safari 1.3/OS X 10.3.9.

I'm also getting blue links (instead of the usual yellow) on AskMe and MeTa, but not MeFI. I am getting yellow links in the three little words just below this text-input box--"MetaFilter, MetaTalk, Ask Metafilter". But all other links, blue. Weird.
posted by adamrice at 8:36 AM on April 18, 2005