The latest release of Firefox, v1.5.0.6, brings with it a number of significant bugs that affect Web-CAT users. While I much prefer this browser to its competitors, this version really blows compared to the usual quality maintained by the mozilla team. There are (at least!) three bugs that users have run into.

First, the latest version of firefox no longer supports WYSIWYG comment entry in student source files (!). It seems that the Javascript support for handling mouse events has changed somehow, so when you click on source code to enter comments (under the Grading tab), the click is not perceived, so no insertion point for comments ever gets set. This is a major drawback. We'll fix the Javascript component as soon as we figure out what caused the breakage.

Second, the latest version of firefox truncates the contents of text areas that contain significant amounts of text. So if you are editing a form that contains pre-filled multi-line text areas, and any of those areas contain more than a few paragraphs, you'll want to scroll to the bottom of each to make sure that the contents are not being truncated. This problem does not seem to affect the WYSIWYG editor, just plain text areas, but it is important to watch out for.

Finally, the latest version of firefox fails to properly format pages with tables properly for printing. In many cases, printouts are simply truncated, with entire pages being completely omitted.

Up until this release, Firefox has been much more solid than IE with respect to standards conformance and reliability. I hope it resumes that trend with the next release. In the mean time, existing users who have updated to the latest version need to watch out!