Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:11 UTC
This has been reported 4 times so far in the last week (first report mentions july 28 as the starting date of issues) through our OTRS system. None of the emails are what I would call "bug report" quality, however we have manged to get one image of the problem. *http://img352.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshotie2.jpg The description describes artifacts in the background, most of the reports call these artifacts "icons". An exerpt from one of the emails: "This just started this week. Every day I go to the daily web page, like today, July 30, to see the events, births, deaths, etc that happened in history. Instead of a clear white background and the text, there is an icon that look like it is behind the text. There is 34 of these icons in each row, the calendar at the top of the page on the left hand side is clear, on the right had side is row after row of these icons. Further down the page where the Events, Births, Deaths, etc are is clear, but everything else has the icons behind, or over it." I am waiting on more images from some of the other folks with the issue as well. A guess, mentioned in #wikimedia-tech was it sounds like these icons *may* be bullet points, stacking up next to each other horizontally. To give some information unearthed by Simetrical on webtv: *Useragent: "Compatible with HTTP, MIME, HTML 3.2 and all Netscape Navigator 4.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0-J extensions" *Suspected revision to cause the issue is: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=rev&sortby=date&revision=38116 - stated the time frame matches.
Created attachment 5116 [details] Image of the problem from first post, uploaded here instead of ImageShack
Yeah, I suspected r38116 because it's a pretty big change and it's the right timeframe. From what I could dig up, WebTV uses or used some custom browser, which is probably chock-full of rendering bugs. You'd think MS would have switched it to IE, but I didn't see any reference to that anywhere. Platonides found an EXE that's supposed to mimic WebTV, but it's from 2003 and apparently doesn't work anyway: http://web.archive.org/web/20030401105916/http://developer.webtv.net/tools/viewer/V28_B020.EXE developer.webtv.net seems to have been shut down under new management, unfortunately. I don't see any dev resources after some quick Googling.
I've got Windows 98 in a VM, which offers "Web TV for Windows" as an optional install; if I can wrassle up the installer CD I'll give it a shot and see if I can get the browser running...
Web TV for Windows 98 doesn't seem terribly helpful; it's got the program guide & integrates with a TV tuner card, but seems to just shell out to IE for any web browsing (all I could find being the banner ads at the bottom which point to a redirector on MSN that 404s out. ;)
This version of the webtv viewer appears to work, at least on Windows 98... :) http://web.archive.org/web/20070619044419/http://developer.msntv.com/Tools/WebTVVwr.asp (The Mac version is a self-extracting Classic app, so won't extract on my modern Intel macs. Yay backwards-compatibility!) It seems to take a long time to load pages, though, and sometimes just sort of ends up with a white screen.
I emailed support4u@cs.webtv.net, requesting a workaround. You never know unless you try.
Looks like you never got an answer. Reopen otherwise
