WordPress 2.8.5 dashboard not working in Firefox
I’ve been playing with an install of WordPress 2.8.5.. & along with a plethora of other bugs & issues, there was one in particular that stood out.
I couldn’t use the dashboard under Firefox.
It took a little searching, but I found the issue. Here’s how to solve it:
In your [blog root]/wp-admin/load-script.php file, around line 618, there is a line thus (this is all on one line, it’s just wrapping when displayed here):
echo “<script type=’text/javascript’ src='” . esc_attr($src) . “‘></script>\n”;
change it to:
echo “<script type=’text/javascript’ src='” . $src . “‘></script>\n”;
and around line 687 there is a line:
echo “<link rel=’stylesheet’ href='” . esc_attr($href) . “‘ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />\n”;
change it to:
echo “<link rel=’stylesheet’ href='” . $href . “‘ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />\n”;
So what’s going on here?
The lines before those two create urls for loading scripts & stylesheets, respectively.
Those urls are then getting run through esc_attr, which turns characters like & into strings like &
Often this is useful, but not here. What it means is that the html that is getting expressed in the page (you can see this if you pull up the dashboard & do a view source) looks like this:
<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load=jquery,utils,quicktags&ver=b64ae9a301a545332f1fcd4c6c5351b4′></script>
and
<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-styles.php?c=1&dir=ltr&load=dashboard,plugin-install,global,wp-admin &ver=6403d4cb3e6353f406fd43f1b0373ec2′ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />
Which basically meant that the files weren’t getting loaded at all, the dashboard was looking like complete crap, and, well, not working at all.
The slight changes above simply remove that encoding, resulting in the correct urls:
<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load=jquery,utils,quicktags&ver=b64ae9a301a545332f1fcd4c6c5351b4′></script>
and
<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’http://[site]/wp-admin/load-styles.php?c=1&dir=ltr&load=dashboard,plugin-install,global,wp-admin &ver=6403d4cb3e6353f406fd43f1b0373ec2′ type=’text/css’ media=’all’ />
related
Firefox 3.5.5 screwy characters appearing
There’s something that’s bugged me ever since I upgraded to Firefox 3. Certain pages that used to work perfectly in Firefox 2 suddenly didn’t.
Instead there would be a mess on the page – lots of square boxes the size of characters with text inside them. Like this 
or maybe this 
Typically this would be some kind of character encoding issue ( the server/browser specifying/requesting UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 etc), or having Auto-Detect universal set off in Firefox – and most sites around the net propose this as a solution (oh, & also recommend partial reinstalls of your O/S).
Uhh, no.
It’s actually a compression issue.
If you’re having this problem, the resolution is this:
Enter into the address bar
about:config
in the Filter textbox below, type
network.http.accept-encoding
You can also just start typing “accept-encoding” until it appears on the screen.
Double click the network.http.accept-encoding entry.
Now, on my browser, it was set to
gzip,deflate;q=0.9,compress;q=0.7
but should have been
gzip,deflate
So, type that into the box & hit OK, then restart your browser (just make sure you close all your windows too)
Voila, you can now surf the web without having to constantly switch back to IE.