[Mediawiki-l] Old MW installations' Monobook skin breaking in Firefox 9

[Daniel Friesen]

On Tue, 03 Jan 2012 06:19:02 -0800, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> So this morning I was greeted with Firefox 9. Trouble is, a couple of
> our internal wikis run old versions (1.13 and 1.15) and ... old
> Monobook appears to be broken by FF9. The sidebar appears only after
> the page content, leaving a large empty space between the wiki logo
> and the sidebar.
>
> Screenshot of the problem on our tech wiki:  
> http://oi42.tinypic.com/35lbz7o.jpg
>
> This is only broken in FF9 - it's fine in current Chrome stable, for  
> example.
>
> Any ideas where we'd go into Monobook to fix this? Wikipedia with
> "useskin=monobook" is not broken in the same manner.
>
> (I realise the actual answer is "upgrade those ancient MediaWikis
> already". But the 1.15 is a somewhat fragile combination of MediaWiki,
> Semantic MediaWiki and customisations ...)
>
>
> - d.

You are correct in your guess, and might as well start working towards  
making it possible to upgrade.
I suppose I'll spare you the usual lecture about how 1.15 is obsolete and  
won't list off the security holes we've fixed since then that never wen't  
into 1.15 and just mention what's wrong in your case.

Old MediaWiki code relied on the presence of navigator.taintEnabled for  
Firefox and well, it was something useless and Firefox has been trying to  
remove it.

Relevant bugs:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679971
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31807

-- 
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]