miscoded

Coming soon to a screen near you!

New software drama, Standards compliance victim, starring:

• The browser who got it right
• The Spec
• The browser who got it wrong
• The site that got it totally wrong but thinks everything is ok

Question of the day is: why does the "news slideshow" on AOL's front page run ten times too fast in Opera?

Because FireFox's implementation of DOM2Events has serious shortcomings, as I've mentioned earlier. AOL.com is the latest and most high-profile site that has run into this problem so far.

On AOL's main page the small "slideshow" runs much faster than it is supposed to, the "play/pause/next" buttons do not work, you get strange alerts about content not being available, and the whole page makes Opera use a lot of CPU resources. This is all because they use a capturing "load" event listener when they meant to use a non-capturing one.

It works in FireFox because it does not support capturing event listeners. It fails in Opera because we follow the spec.

I've written a couple of pages to show the difference. Try these in FireFox and Opera:

• FireFox doesn't get it 1: capturing listeners should not fire on target
• FireFox doesn't get it 2: loading progress bar demo

Since I have written the test cases, could someone do me a favour and make sure there is a Bugzilla report on the second issue? I know bug 235441 covers the former.