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.

An old IE bug has struck again. Many versions of Internet Explorer have trouble downloading files over SSL (via an https connection). When you try to download a file from Web-CAT using IE, you may get an error indicating it is "unable to download", and that the requested site is unavailable. This is due to a bug in IE, which does not correctly download these files because it believes it should not store a copy in its local cache. As a work-around, you can simply go to your browser's address bar and change the "https:" at the beginning of your page address to "http:" and reload the page. You'll turn off SSL, and IE should then be able to download the file.

If you are an IE user with a Dell widescreen notebook or a Dell that shipped with a hi-res widescreen display, IE may make images on web pages look more pixelated and awful than usual. This is particularly true on the Web-CAT wiki, for example. It looks like Dell may have "turned on" a feature of IE on such machines that tells the browser to auto-scale images proportionally to the larger font size that many users have selected. Read this blog entry describing the problem and how to fix it (and end your suffering :-) ).

Previously, I added auto-update support for Web-CAT subsystems. Now, I've finally got the same kind of auto-update support (plus self-installation support) implemented for grading plug-ins. This makes plug-ins "self-patching", in the sense that Web-CAT automatically looks for, downloads, and installs new versions of existing plug-ins each time it starts up.