FireFox/ARTstor Issues

Due to recent releases of the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers, we
wanted to give you an update on some of the compatibility issues that
your users may experience when using ARTstor. In general, ARTstor's site
builds are designed to be compatible with all existing versions of
certain browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari,
and PWB) at the time of the ARTstor release. In some cases, new versions
of these browsers are released after the ARTstor site build. When this
happens, we make every effort to test ARTstor in the new environments,
document any incompatibilities, and initiate any remedial fixes to
resolve outstanding issues. As we are still in this process with regard
to Internet Explorer 7.0 and Firefox 1.5.0.7 and up, we thought it would
be helpful to provide an update of where we currently stand.

Firefox (Macs only)
On September 14, 2006, Firefox released version 1.5.0.7 to improve
browser stability and to implement several security fixes
(http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/1.5.0.7.html). In many
cases, this was an automatic upgrade, so we did not have much lead time
to do adequate testing with ARTstor in the new browser. Almost
immediately, we discovered two bugs specifically related to Firefox and
Macs:

1) When a user goes to log onto their ARTstor account, the email field
is available, but the user cannot input anything into the password
field. This prevents the user from successfully logging onto their
ARTstor account.
2) Immediately after launching the ARTstor Digital Library, the Welcome
Page will load in fragments. Users must mouse over the blank,
unpopulated areas for those sections to fully load. In essence, the user
must mouse over the whole screen to render the entire page.

While we were working on fixes to these bugs, Firefox released another
version of the browser (2.0) on October 30, 2006
(http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/releasenotes/). Firefox 2.0
actually fixed problem #1, but #2 still remains an issue for Mac users.
While we continue working on this outstanding page rendering bug (#2),
we recommend that Mac users either roll back to a previous version of
Firefox (0.9.1 - 1.0.8), or use the alternative Safari browser.

Internet Explorer (PCs only)
On October 18, 2006, Microsoft released version 7.0 of the Internet
Explorer web browser (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx).
Since IE 7.0 was available in beta prior to the release, we were able to
do some testing before the new browser was made available to Windows
2003 and XP users. So far, there do not seem to be too many
compatibility issues, aside from the following:

1) When opening the Image Viewer window, the bottom row of icons often
gets covered up by the Windows taskbar. We are working on a fix to this
bug, but in the meantime, users may use the following workaround:
http://www.artstor.org/webhelp/When_I_open_an_Image_Viewer_window,_the_i
cons_and_or_navigation_bars_are_missing.htm.
2) A new major new feature of IE 7.0 is tabbed browsing. Since the
ARTstor application and the Image Viewer launch in separate windows, if
the IE 7.0 browser launches either within a tab, users will experience
some odd display issues. The default setting for IE 7.0 should be fine,
but if users experience any difficulties, they should check their
settings for tabbed browsing. Go to the Tools menu > Internet Options >
General tab > Tabs section, click on Settings button > "When a popup is
encountered" section, make sure the box next to "Always open pop-ups in
a new tab" is unchecked > Click OK.

This is a summary of all currently known bugs with the new Firefox and
Internet Explorer releases. If you experience any other compatibility
issues with either of these browsers, please do contact us (toll free:
888 278 0079 or email: userservices@artstor.org), as we are keen to
document all known bugs so that we can develop fixes as soon as
possible.