Member Avatar for Anax

Hia,
A user (was a potential client) is seeing jumbled up pages on my site and I have no idea why.

There follows a screenshot of what she has been seeing for the past few days, and a screenshot of the correct rendering seen by myself and other users I've asked.

She is using Firefox, and is finding all pages similarly jumbled up. I have not been making template changes recently. It looks like a css problem somehow.


This is the live site

Any leads or ideas much appreciated.

CorrectGLHomepage1_10_07x.png 60.89 KB FaultyGLHomepage1_10_07x.png 58.02 KB
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by tiptopland

Dani AI

Generated

Brief summary and practical follow-ups.

Because confirmed that clearing the affected user’s browser cache fixed the problem, the most likely immediate cause was a corrupted or truncated cached asset (CSS, JS or image) rather than a site template bug. ’ point about user font/zoom settings is still valid as a separate cause for layout breakage, and ’s refresh note lines up with transient cache/resource issues. Below are concrete checks and mitigation steps that were not covered in the thread.

Quick diagnostic checklist (ask the affected user to try these)

  • Open a Private/Incognito window (bypasses normal cache) and load the page.
  • With DevTools open, enable Network → “Disable cache” and reload. Inspect any CSS/JS entries for non-200 statuses, unusually small sizes, or binary garbage.
  • Try a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5 / Shift+Refresh). If it fixes the problem, cached asset corruption is almost certain.
  • If possible, fetch the stylesheet directly and compare size/content to what you serve from the server.
  • Try the page with extensions disabled or in the browser’s safe mode to rule out add-ons.

Server-side hardening and prevention

  • Ensure response headers are correct (Content-Type, Content-Encoding only if actually gzipped, Vary: Accept-Encoding). Misconfigured compression or proxies can serve corrupted files.
  • Use asset versioning (fingerprinted filenames or a ?v=... query) so clients fetch new copies after changes.
  • Consider sane Cache-Control/ETag policies so caches don’t serve stale or partial files.

Example quick checks

curl -I https://your.site/path/style.css
# look for Content-Type, Content-Encoding, Cache-Control, ETag, Content-Length

Design note: test the site at different page-zoom and font-size settings and avoid rigid pixel-only layouts so a single-user setting won’t catastrophically break the page.

Recommended Answers

All 8 Replies

Member Avatar for jbennet

I get the same thing with Daniweb (here) sometimes . I am using IE7.

Refreshing seems to help. I dont know what the problem is though, it does it on a clean install?

Member Avatar for Anax

I'm sure I've seen similar, and fixed it up with a refresh or a browser window resize. But she's come back to it several times, and she gets a similar effect on different pages in the site.

Could there be some setting on her Firefox that could cause it? I don't know what to suggest or where to look for the solution.

Member Avatar for jbennet

I dont think so. I expereince the bug in IE?

Member Avatar for MattEvans

She seems to have massive fonts on her window title frames, and on the text of the page itself. Look at the size of font for the title bar on the Firefox window. I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and assume that she has some need or desire to have larger than usual fonts. I'm also gonna assume that she uses Firefox's god-awful increase/decrease text size setting; which is like a poor-mans zoom in/out OR she uses Windows configuration to increase font size in all windows.

Result; your text size increases, everything which relies on text size /placement gets misplaced. Can be fixed, but it involves total redesign with this in mind.

It looks even worse for me, with only a moderate increase in text size under FF.. Well I say moderate.. it jumps between 'slightly large' and 'enormous' with about two clicks.. It's an awful feature, and it messes up anything but plaintext.

evenworse.png 254.24 KB
Member Avatar for MattEvans

Hm. That uploaded image got messed up somehow, preview is ok, fullsize view is only about 15% of the image visible, then noise/distortion, then blank.. It was a 256 colour PNG.. maybe that did it. Uploading a jpg aswell.. ignore this one if the last one worked for you.

EDIT: Ha. That one's cut in half on fullsize view aswell, I dunno.

I'm sure you understand what I'm saying though, and it doesn't really need a picture to support it. The text size increase within Firefox itself is bad enough, and I think that it could be even worse visually if an operating system font size setting was being respected, half heartedly, by Firefox.

evenworse.jpg 185.56 KB
Member Avatar for Anax

Thanks muchly jbennet and MattEvans for your thoughtss.

I asked her to clear her cache and to my surprise that fixed it. I'm guessing some file (maybe CSS) was corrupted during download and got stored in her cache for days.

All fixed now.

Member Avatar for MidiMagic

Maybe the browser doesn't do frames, has frames turned off, or has a script or code in cache that turns off frames..

I don't like frames either.

Member Avatar for tiptopland

Hi dear
Relax, I use Firefox and have no problem with ur site. She Increse font size in her browser and make all web site fuzzy, it's not ur problem and it's user side problem.
good job

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