Update
31 Oktober 2006 - It appears Google's 'Dissatisfied form' is quite effective, or they came across the problem themselves. Either way, it seems they have adjusted the CSS and removed position:relative from the g class. Google's sponsored links work again, but I do feel that it is Firefox 2 that got it wrong. No word from Mozilla so far.
Original Post
I recently upgraded to Firefox 2.0 and to my surprise I was no longer able to click Google's Sponsored Links. I quickly checked if it was caused by any of my add-ons, but that does not seem to be the case. In fact, the Web Developer toolbar gave me a better picture of what is happening.
The blue box marks the table that holds the sponsored links. The red boxes are paragraphs with class g, although the top most box is a paragraph with the class e. While the top most box, containing the "News results for .." is beneath the table, the other boxes containing search results are on top of the table. This prevents the links in the table from getting clicks, often rendering all the sponsored links inactive.
The fix? It is clear that the problem lies in the g class as the e class on the same type of element works fine. Here is the css:
-
.e { margin-top:.75em;margin-bottom:.75em }
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.g { margin-top:1em;margin-bottom:1em;position:relative }
Your first guess is correct, without position:relative everything works exactly as intended. So unless someone already acted on this before me...
...should I explain this problem to Google or Mozilla?
Tim says:
On October 30th, 2006 at 18:47
Nicely Spotted allthough i use flock and am the proud owner of a free Flock T-Shirt i think you should report this to mozzilla as it would be easier im sure its a bug on thier part as Google was working fine before and works fine in Flock.
But you could email Google too.
Tim.
Martin Kool says:
On October 30th, 2006 at 21:12
Yeah, I used Firefox 2′s new ‘Report broken website’ function and Google’s ‘Dissatisfied form’ for a lack of anything better.
There are probably more sites than just Google that suffer from this bug. Although… a block with a relative position defined, next to a table that is aligned right is probably a rare occurance.
This article is mentioned at:
ourr » links for 2006-10-31
On November 1st, 2006 at 1:29
[...] ODDEND.COM – Firefox 2 Broke Google? Firefox 2 ????? Google ? bug (tags: bug Firefox Google CSS) [...]
Martijn says:
On November 1st, 2006 at 14:27
Do you have some testcase or html code that shows the bug?
Martin Kool says:
On November 1st, 2006 at 20:57
I will create an example later, but you can save Google’s results page and replace the current .e and .g styles with the ones displayed in the post above.
Martin Kool says:
On November 2nd, 2006 at 14:57
Please post further feedback at this post.
Martijn, I have also included an example page at the new post.