A common print problem with Firefox

Predictably, there is no end to the carping about how the newly released versions of Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0 compare, a head-to-head battle that editorially Firefox always seems destined to win, and justifiably so.

I share the view that Firefox is the preferable of the two dominant web browsers, and yet as good as Firefox is, it has its quirks. One of them LSNC discovered only when it converted to large numbers of staffers using Firefox after deploying Pika. The problem we encountered was getting search results tables (e.g., a list of cases) to print out correctly. The problem had nothing to do with Pika. The problem turned out to be with our custom print style sheet. The search results tables uniformly printed out as intended in IE, but in Firefox we could only get it to print the first page of the listed results; the second and subsequent pages would print out as blank pages. Yeow! Later, we discovered the problem was not just our custom print style sheet; the printing problems with Firefox also plagued other web locations as well. For example, view this sample U.S. Code page at Cornell and then use print preview in IE and then Firefox. See how the second and third pages just vanish in Firefox?

What to do? Two possible solutions:

As discussed by CSS guru Eric Meyer in When Printing Maims, it may be that your particular page design (as did our heavily redesigned Pika templates) relies on floats for positioning of the “main content” area. In your print style sheet, adding the CSS property {float:none} to the selector that corresponds to the structural element containing the affected text may solve the problem.

In our case, it actually didn’t, but a suggestion further down that same discussion thread hit the nail on the head: Add {display:table-cell} to the CSS for the affected container. For Firefox, this totally solved the problem with printing out our search results tables. And this particular CSS property is a non-issue for IE, since it doesn’t recognize that value.