A coding woe from... firefox?

[MetalMusicMan]

Yes... I'm not sure how this happened, here's the story.

Randomly yesterday, all of the site's main pages started showing up with a PHP error from the forum's SSI code base.  I had changed nothing on the site, so this all seemed entirely random.  Between me and the host, we determined that removing some excess "requires / includes" we could get the pages to show up again.  So, that was that, not sure why that suddenly happened when the same code worked for almost 2 years, but whatever.


The problem is this-- today, also randomly, the "footers" at the bottom of the front pages show up in the middle of the screen on any page in which the content is not longer than the left side menu.  For instance, www.metalmusicman.com/misc 

I know for a fact that this was not an existing error because I went out of my way to make sure it didn't happen when I first made this layout.  The REALLY weird thing is that IE reads the code fine, and displays the footer on the bottom of the page.  The problem is only with Firefox...

It's not just DIVs either, it's ANYTHING.  Even if I type plain text after the main content layout, it shows up in the middle of the fucking page.

Anyway, my head is going to explode.  Does anyone have any idea what could cause this?  (I'm looking at you, Mags!)

[magnesium]

I know that the Mozilla group did a major overhaul of the CSS code interpreted by firefox in version 3.0 and maybe introduced some new ones? for info about the improvements they made (maybe you can figure out what broke by looking at the list) check out http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS_improvements_in_Firefox_3

Additionally to help you determine what went wrong you may want to download the firebug addon, which you can get from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 . It's probably a good thing to have as a developer regardless.

Also, maybe you have an overflow error as described in http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/node/3815 ?

[MetalMusicMan]

I read into some of that, FF3 may have been the reason, I may have just not noticed until now.

However, luckily someone on the SMF Community boards was prompt and helpful with this:

It's because of floated elements aren't part of layout. Adding "clear: both" to CSS copyright div fixes this.

And what do you know, it worked!  I have no idea what that piece of code is or why I suddenly need it, but whatever, it fixed the problem.