techblog 

I’ve been working on something in Wordpress with my colleague Ewan, and we ran into a very strange problem with Firefox yesterday. The theme which Ewan was designing for it looked fine to him in Firefox, but to myself and a colleague had a few issues visually. The header image wasn’t in the correct place, and a couple of elements disappeared that should have been there. The curious thing was that we were all running Firefox 2.0.0.6 and above.

After trying various things, we realised that Ewan’s version was upgraded from 1.5 to 2.0, whereas the rest of us were using clean installs of 2.0. Ewan cleaned Firefox off his machine, installed the latest version, upon which he could see things the same as us.

So what caused this? Were some elements of Firefox referring to an older version of Gecko (Mozilla’s rendering engine)? What did trouble us was the idea that other people may be designing websites for Firefox, and just not seeing what their users see.