Problems with Mozilla

Next: Problems with Explorer, Previous: Problems with Saxon 6.5.2, Up: Problems with associated applications

10.1.2 Netscape/Mozilla

Mozilla uses a very big bug tracking system called Bugzilla. Despite it it's unfortunately very rare that non-fatal bugs are fixed. But although the following list seems to be long, the problems are small by and large.

Unicode spacing characters are printed as symbols. This is a known Mozilla bug but as long as Mozilla is reluctant to solve it, tbook silently substitutes ordinary spaces for those Unicode symbols. This includes   (Thin Space), &emsp; (Em Space), &zwnj; (Zero Width Non-Joiner for breaking up ligatures), and &bph; (Break Permitted Here).
Stacking of equations does not work perfectly. The MathML tag <mlabeledtr> is necessary if you use stacked equations with numbering. Unfortunately Mozilla ignores this tag and prints such equations next to each other, so tbook uses <mtr> tags instead as a provisional solution. However this means that the position of the equation number is not optimal.
Bitmap equations may cause bad line breaks. This is a known Mozilla bug. Immediately before and after an inline bitmap Mozilla may insert a line break even if there is no space character. A typical (German) example is “x-Achse” (x axis). If the “x” becomes a small PNG bitmap, it may look in Mozilla like this:
```
     
     blah blah blah blah blah blah blah x
     -Achse blah blah blah blah blah
```
which is of course unacceptable.
Bad line breaks with MathML equations. The MathML code in Mozilla is still under development and particularly the line breaking algorithm is all but mature. Please note that all parts embraced by <mrow> (or {} in LaTeX syntax) will never be broken, neither in HTML nor in LaTeX. So if you write <m>{E=mc^2}</m> this whole equation will always be on the same line.
There are also bad line breaks around a MathML equation, similar to the problems with small bitmap equations above. This, too, is a known Mozilla bug.
Links to equations doesn't seem to work. When you click on a link to an equations, nothing happens. This is a known Mozilla bug. Mozilla doesn't know that ID attributes at MathML tags are real IDs that it can jump to. The underlying reason is that it doesn't read a proper MathML DTD. You can embed the necessary attribute declarations manually in your XHTML files like here:
```
     
     <!DOCTYPE html
       PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0//EN"
              "http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/dtd/xhtml-math11-f.dtd"
     [
       <!ATTLIST mtd id ID #IMPLIED>
       ... the same for other MathML elements ...
     ]>
```
tbook does so by itself if you call it with the undocumented XSLT parameter mathml-ids-in-doctype set to true. However, the Internet Explorer is stupid enough to display the last “]>”. Therefore tbook uses slightly different CSS code in this case, hiding the “]>” by setting the text colour to white. This works at least for Mozilla and IE6, but please test it with other browsers, too, before you use it. Feedback concerning this is welcome.¹

Footnotes

[1] Since 2003/10/22 this bug is fixed in sources. The upcoming versions (that will contain this fix presumably) are Mozilla 1.6 and Firebird 0.7.