Safari

Web Browser Font Rendering is the New Edge Case

In the early days of the web, designers and developers relied upon visitors to the sites they were developing to have their chosen font pre-installed on their computers so that their web browser of choice would be able to properly render the selected font. As quickly became obvious, there is a wide variety of fonts installed across all computers worldwide, so this was not an achievable scenario, especially when print level typography was desired. Unfortunately, at that time, the solution was to put all of the text in an image, ensuring the text would display exactly as the designer had specified, but hiding the same text from search engines and blind users.

LocalStorage and Safari Weirdness

One of the technologies that has been intriguing to me for a while has been LocalStorage on the web browser. One of my first adventures into using persistent storage other than cookies on a web browser was the short-lived HTML 5 standard of the webSQL database. It turns out that it was simply a SQL Lite database that was accessible via JavaScript in all the WebKit browsers as well as Firefox. However, Internet Explorer did not implement this functionality, and the webSQL standard was soon dropped from the HTML 5 standard itself, leaving only the LocalStorage key/value storage mechanism.

Links Not Working? Check AdBlock Plus

It turns out that the issues with useForcedLinkTracking are not isolated just to Safari’s popup blocker. Unfortunately, one of the most popular browser for both Chrome and Firefox, AdBlock Plus is subject to this issue as well.

One of the things that the AdBlock Plus plugin does is attempt to intercept any and all link traffic to determine whether it was created from an actual mouse click or if it was triggered through JavaScript as part of a marketing campaign. When used on a site with Adobe’s SiteCatalyst analytics with useForcedLinkTracking turned on and target="_blank" set in the hyperlink, you will trigger the issue. If you run into this issue, you can fix it by:

Avoid SiteCatalyst's useForcedLinkTracking and target="_blank"

All sites rely upon some third party analytics software to track at the very least the number of visitors to a site. Many sites use Google Analytics, which provide much more information that just the number of visitors. Another option that some of the bigger sites use is Adobe Analytics, aka SiteCatalyst to enable more custom tracking options that are not evident through the Google Analytics interface.

One feature of SiteCatalyst is that it allows you to set an option useForcedLinkTracking that will track every link on your site for clicks whether or not you have setup custom tracking for the links or not. Effectively what the code does is create a JavaScript event handler to intercept all click events on the <a href="http://url.com">Link</a> hyperlinks. Once they are intercepted, SiteCatalyst sends its tracking information to its servers and then procedes to attempt to make sure that the link functions properly. Unfortunately, in some versions of the SiteCatalyst code, it attempts to create a synthetic click event that works in many cases. However, if you are using Safari with the popup blocker turned on, and a target="_blank" in the hyperlink, then it will trigger the popup blocker, which simply ignores the click, and the user sees nothing happen at all. In order to fix it, hopefully the latest version of the SiteCatalyst code will handle it, turn off useForcedLinkTracking, or, as the very last resort, convert the <a /> links to another type of element and use JavaScript to open the new window manually when listening for the click event on the new element. It seems this works all the time, but it will prevent SiteCatalyst from tracking those clicks.