Mac Firefox problems

  • Attempts to find an answer via search have failed, so here goes.

    1) The text displayed in Firefox on my new Powerbook is all messed up. Looks fine in Safari and of course in IE and FF on my PC. Blog: threequirrels.com.

    In particular there seems to be a problem with the way that links are displayed. It looks as if the space before a linked word is deleted so that it backspaces up against the preceding text.

    For instance, right below this text input box I see the phrase:

    (called tags)

    In my Firefox browser it renders as

    (calledtags)

    with no space after “called.”

    2) In Firefox on the Mac the text entry boxes in WordPress exhibit very, very strange behaviour, with characters overwriting each other, backspace not removing characters when deleted, and generally making it impossible to compose items.

    Again, this seems to work fine in Safari.

    I’m brand new on the Mac, and am having enough trouble sorting out more critical issues, so am hoping to find someone who can give mea quick heads up to solve these.

    Note: All software is the latest version, except WP, which I plan to upgrade to verson 2 this week.

    Thanks,

    Barry

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter barryrueger

    (@barryrueger)

    I just oposted this over at the Firefox site:

    Very interesting this one and I’ve found nothing on it. I’ve also posted it to the WordPress site.

    I am running a WordPress blog. threequirrels.com. It works dandy on Windows FF, Opera, and IE, and on Safari on the Mac, but not Firefox on the same Powerbook g4.

    Symptoms (pix at https://www.community-media.com/wp_firefox.html)

    1) The text displayed in Firefox on my new Powerbook is all messed up. Looks fine in Safari and of course in IE and FF on my PC.

    In particular there seems to be a problem with the way that links are displayed. It looks as if the space before a linked word is deleted so that it backspaces up against the preceding text.

    See picture one above.

    2) Some text spills over to places where it shouldn’t be. See picture 2.

    2) In Firefox on the Mac the text entry boxes in WordPress exhibit very, very strange behaviour, with characters overwriting each other, backspace not removing characters when deleted, and generally making it impossible to compose items.

    See picture 3. This is the really, really strange one.

    In fact, I find the same behavior with the text entry box here.

    I’ve just moved to the Mac, and am still figuring out all sorts of transitional problems, so any help is appreciated.

    Thread Starter barryrueger

    (@barryrueger)

    Ah! A third page of Google results found the fix. Duplicate fonts on the Mac.

    A fix for an odd Thunderbird/Firefox font problem
    <https://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050516115315910

    I had the same problem when I upgraded to Tiger. Text in Camino (a Mozilla-based browser) would frequently overlap, making some words nearly unreadable. Upon firing up Font Book, I noticed many of my font families had a bullet ( ? ) beside them, indicating that duplicate font files were being loaded. By expanding the disclosure triangle beside affected families, I could see which individual fonts were duplicate. I selected the duplicates and chose Edit > Disable Fonts (File > Remove Fonts would be another option), and then restarted Camino. Lo and behold, text rendered very nicely again.

    In my case, the duplicate fonts were .ttf (eg. Helvectica.ttf) files that I had manually placed in my ~/Library/Fonts directory some time ago. They never caused problems in Panther, but seem to conflict with their corresponding .dfont (eg. Helvetica.dfont) files in Tiger.

    Thread Starter barryrueger

    (@barryrueger)

    Well, the solution above only worked until I restarted the Mac. There seemed to be no way to make it “stick”. I would disable ALL of the User fonts, and Firefox would work again, but after rebooting the problem came back.

    I also tried deleting the font cache, as described here:
    https://www.thexlab.com/faqs/undofontbook.html

    1) Startup in Safe Mode.
    2) Log in to your account. This will result in your current font cache being moved to the Trash. Only System fonts are available in Safe Mode.
    3) Log out of your account.
    4) Restart your Mac normally, i.e. do not restart in Safe Mode.
    5) Log in to your account.
    6) All previously-disabled fonts will be enabled and load. If you’ve installed hundreds or thousands of fonts, many of which had been disabled with Font Book, this could result in very slow performance of your Mac until all previously-disabled fonts are again disabled.
    7) Empty the Trash.

    Finally I opted for the brute force method and tracked down which of the three or four font directories held the user fonts:

    Users/barryrueger/Library/Fonts

    I then deleted ALL fonts from that directory and it seems that it fixed the problem.

    My best guess is that some of the fonts from my old windows machine that were copied over/installed to the mac somehow didn’t work. I foolishly assumed that OS X would only let me install what worked, but I was wrong.

    Thread Starter barryrueger

    (@barryrueger)

    Further note, yes, I had validated all of the fonts and disabled or deleted those which OS X said had problems.

    Found your post after lots and lots of searching. I have exactly the same problem – except I have followed every step you have and it’s still there!

    Any ideas?

    font explorer: https://www.linotype.com/fontexplorerX
    (free) should work better for managing and investigating duplicate fonts. It’s a great program all around.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • The topic ‘Mac Firefox problems’ is closed to new replies.

Tags