CSS Summit – test cases for browser bugs

Speaking the CSS Summit today, I listened as people voiced concerns about browser support and bugs. It might surprise my fellow CSS developers, but many of the seasoned, bearded (ok, I’m making this part up) engineers working on the innards of browsers and rendering engines may not actually write much CSS themselves. They need our help.

We need to tell them what is broken, via good bug reports with steps to reproduce, version information, and relevant comments, screenshots and ideally test cases. Can you boil the bug down to the simplest possible version of itself? How little code do you need to trigger the rendering problem? That’s the test case you want to submit.

Also, what do we need and want out of our browsers (they are our browers!). What features should they be working on? I know they are all pretty focused on advanced selectors, working like mad to find ways to pattern match any attribute efficiently. That isn’t easy. They can’t afford to let the performance of their rendering engines suffer, so if they seem to go slowly. Keep in mind they are being cautious because users demand fast browsers.

What they should be focused on? What innovations do we want to see?

In honor of that, I’ve created a couple test pages to show overflow and float print stylesheet bugs in Firefox. These bugs have been around for years, irked me, but it is time I not only post to my blog about it, but also open a bug. Don’t know how to file a bug? John Resig wrote a great article about web developers responsibility to help browsers get better in which he gives detailed advice including links to Mozilla/Firefox, WebKit/Safari, Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome / V8 JavaScript Engine, and the Opera bug tracking systems.