Wikipedia:Browser notes

• Section "[edit]" links may be misplaced for some sections.

• Large text sizes in wikEd and Custom Regex Gadgets?

• Superscript text creates a few pixels of extra line space. There is a fix, though with the fix the superscript/subscript text looks and slightly raised or lowered instead of superscripted or subscripted, making it hard to determine what is superscripted or subscripted in some instances.
• Quotes not displaying on Wikipedia pages properly?
• Click on View → Encoding → Automatic Selection.

Old versions of IE demonstrate poor support of relatively recent (e.g., post-1999) W3C Web standards, but are still in use. As a result, certain elements may not look or work exactly right, although generally a workaround of some kind is implemented server-side if possible. Among the most visible issues are:

OmniWeb is no longer maintained, but is still available for download.

Also has been discontinued.

• 32.0: Does not display IPA fonts correctly

• 41.0.2 works well.

• Konqueror may trigger automatic protection that Wikipedia has in place to make it harder for some spiders if a web shortcut for Wikipedia is enabled and used. Make sure Konqueror is identifying itself to Wikipedia, preferably as itself.

• Absence of Dillo from the support matrix at [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility#Browser_support_matrix https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility#Browser_support_matrix] means no official support.
• In Debian 11 at 2022-09-18, Dillo 3.0.5-7 works nicely for reading. =8~) May allow editing.(?) Attempt to upload to Commons fails with a misleading error message mentioning the server. Better to say uploading from Dillo is not supported.
• To allow login, add this line in ~/.dillo/cookiesrc

Warning: Many console browsers will convert text in edit boxes to the encoding in use by your terminal (or what the browser thinks is your terminal's encoding which may not be the same thing) either at page load time (links and lynx) or when editing a field (w3m). If your terminal encoding is UTF-8 this is not a problem but if your terminal is using a legacy encoding (or is using UTF-8 but your browser thinks it's using a legacy encoding) then this is likely to destroy characters that are not present in the encoding your terminal is using when you save the page after editing.

• Text only, but renders tables and frames.
• Supports HTTP authentication.
• Users can use their text editor of choice to edit textarea fields.
• Problems with editing UTF-8; set "User-agent identification" (in setup->option manager->protocols->http) to something like "Lynx/elinks/%v (textmode; %s; %t-%b)" to get non-ascii characters as hex codes.
• View is enhanced (especially of diffs) by using the following user.css and lua hook file (place in ${HOME}/.elinks and enable via option manager)

• In old versions the login may be broken. (Try to check referrer sending and cookie handling. If everything fails try to use ELinks, and check the same settings.)

• Users can use their text editor of choice to edit textarea fields (this feature needs to be enabled at compile time)
• Forces wrapping of very long lines in a textarea, which is a problem in editing some articles.
• Display options for non-ASCII characters affect editing.
• Most tables are rendered as simple text.
• Viewing of diffs and redlinks can be improved by adding the following to the lynx.lss configuration file:
• ::span.diffchange:bold:brightred
• ::td.diff-deletedline:bold:green
• ::td.diff-addedline:bold:cyan
• ::a.new:bold:cyan

See: Wikipedia:Wikipedia on PDAs and Help:Mobile access.

• See Mediazilla:5402.

• May block access to articles if they begin with blocked strings such as "ad"

• On default settings, disallows access to articles beginning with the word "ad" (ad hoc, ad hominem etc.)

• Filterset set blocks /ad/ in URLs, use Adblock Plus and Filterset.G Whitelist to bypass (whitelists Wikimedia related URLs)

Some browser extensions are not fully compatible with Wikipedia or may have unwanted effects. Some extensions add text like when editing

• May break wikilinks during editing, e.g. changing foo to [foo-en] or bar to [foo|bar-en] ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1111132766#Wikilink_markup_being_changed_by_MediaWiki discussion]).

• May arbitrarily remove strings starting with numbers when editing ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Gareth_Jones&oldid=556165153#Random_removal_of_strings discussion])

• Intentionally blocks scripts (user-configurable by website) but may prevent fallback to the normal behaviour for browsers without JavaScript enabled, e.g. breaking the "New section" feature for some users (discussion)

• Has a "QuickiWiki" option which may arbitrarily add the string "QuickiWiki Look Up" when editing ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Edit_filter/Requested&oldid=555558125#Adding_QuickiWiki discussion])

• May display italics markup ... in page names instead of rendering in italics (discussion)

File:QuestionaboutSkypeicon.png

• Some content-control software (list) may automatically block content it deems objectionable, or remove certain words from pages

• Some browser extensions including Codec-C and InfoAtoms may add ads to Wikipedia pages without properly informing the user (discussion)

• Some extensions may bypass the file page and jump directly to the actual file when an image is clicked, for example http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/70/Example.png instead of :File:Example.png

Plugins that can be used to search Wikipedia more easily.

• Allows any text editor to be used once the option is set.

• Internally highlights misspelled words in textareas.

• Underlines misspelled words in textareas if you check the Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling as You Type option. Control-click or right-click for a list of suggested corrections.

• [http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gallery/content.html#spellchecking Underlines misspelled words] in textareas if you check the Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling as You Type option and offers more advanced [http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gallery/content.html#zoom editing options for textareas].

• [http://www.iespell.com/ IESpell] adds spellchecking to Internet Explorer.
• [http://bur.st/~benc/site/?external External] is a small program that may help you use any external program to edit the textareas in the browser

• Opera 10 and above: inline spelling checking based on the OpenOffice.org dictionaries called Hunspell.
• pre Opera 10: Supports the spelling checking on Windows and Linux if you install GNU Aspell. [http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spellcheck/index.dml?platform=windows Instructions] are available from Opera.

• Universal Edit Button adds an extra icon in the address bar for the editable pages
• [http://www.bananeweizen.de/ Wikipedia Extension]
• Adds a toolbar with various formatting functions and quicklinks to most Special: pages.
• Not tested on Mac
• Make sure you get the latest version, 0.7.1 as of this writing; download at update.mozilla.org is out-of-date and does not work on 1.0
• SpellBound adds spellchecking to Firefox, supporting international dictionaries. Download from [http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/ here] for Firefox up to 1.0.x and from [http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=351130&highlight=spellbound here] for Firefox 1.5.x. Firefox 2.0.x has spellchecking built in.
• These tools add an option to the browser to use an external editor on a web page textarea.
• [http://mozex.mozdev.org/ Mozex]
• Doesn't support Mozilla on Mac
• Doesn't support Firefox 1.0 as provided (see [http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/FireFox this] for a workaround)
• [http://electrix.mozdev.org/ Electrix]
• Not currently maintained
• [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125 It's All Text!]

• [http://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/ UnicodeChecker] allows in-place conversion of Unicode text to HTML entities and back. Requires OS X Mountain Lion (10.8). Freeware.
• Great for editing text in non-ISO-8859-1 character sets on the English-language Wikipedia (Cyrillic, etc.).
• Works as a system service from a menu (Safari→Services→Unicode→), or keyboard shortcut (command-shift-8).
• [http://cocoaspell.leuski.net/ CocoAspell] adds international spelling dictionaries to the inline spell-checker. Freeware.
• Based on UNIX Aspell.

The latest version (3.0 from 1997) of NCSA MOSAIC will not load Wikimedia pages due to lack of support for the HTTP 1.1 host header system.

NetPositive ran only on BeOS. Not all elements of the CSS recognized, though still fairly functional. NetPositive has issues with some HTML entities on repeated editing (replacing entities by the character glyph), so be careful.

The very old Netscape Navigator, cannot edit long pages. See Wikipedia:Article size.

Internet Explorer for Mac OS X runs only on classic Mac OS.

• 5.0: cut long pages in editing mode; encoding issues. Overlapping text and bar in some pages (prefs)
• 6.0: add undesirable blank lines, crashes unexpectedly

Side toolbar appears in wrong location (below any main text).

Prior to Firefox 2, the find-as-you-type text search ignored the edit window. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189039 Bugzilla@Mozilla bug 189309] documents the issue, which does not occur in the newer version, Firefox 3.

Safari on Windows renders fonts using its own algorithm that yields results differing slightly from the native Windows font renderer.[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html]

Default settings

#column-content {

margin: 0 0 0 0;
line-height: 1em;
float: none;
}

content {

margin: 0.0em 0 0 0; /* Change the 0.0em to 2.8em to make */
/* extra white space at the top of a wiki page */
/* The 0.0em causes the tab buttons at */
/* the top ("edit this page", etc) to disappear */
/* on gecko based browsers. In such a situation hit */
/* "alt+shift+e" to edit this page */
line-height: 1em;
padding: 0 0 0 0.2em;
}
/* Something about the above two sets of lines makes all content flow */
/* linearly down the page */

column-one {

padding-top: 0px;
line-height: 1em;
}

p-logo {

position: relative;
}

globalWrapper {

font-size: 100%; /* Sets all fonts to normal size */
line-height: 1em;
}

contentSub {

font-size: 100%; /* Sets all fonts to normal size */
margin: 0 0 0 0; /* Removes margins */
line-height: 1em;
color: #FFFFFF; /* Sets the background to white */
}
ul, ol, li, dt, dd, p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
line-height: 1em;
} /* Packs lines nicely*/
div.tright, div.tleft {
border-width: 0 0 0 0;
line-height: 1em;
padding: 0 0 0 0;
} /* Shrinks thumb picture frames as much as possible. */
div.thumb div div.thumbcaption {
line-height: 1em;
padding: 0 0 0 0;
} /* Shrinks thumb picture frames as much as possible. */

• List of web browsers
• Wikipedia:Bypass your cache
• Wikipedia:Article size
• Wikipedia:Using JAWS
• Help:Multilingual support

{{reflist}}

• Mozilla variants
• [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ Firefox]
• [https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ SeaMonkey]
• [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge Microsoft Edge] (Windows only)
• [https://www.opera.com/ Opera for Windows & Mac]
• [https://www.apple.com/safari/ Safari]
• [https://www.omnigroup.com/more OmniWeb] (was for Mac, no longer actively maintained)