A couple weeks ago I post about how my site appeared to be affected by some sort of Google Analytics breakage. Well after some time investigating this, it appears that Google has nothing to do with this after all. In fact the page is perfectly viewable by everyone except for my Firefox browser at work. Well it appears that they block the javascript loaded by the Google Analytics code that they have you past into your page. That, seems to significantly affect Firefox’s ability to load the page.
Which brings me back to one of things I noted in the original post: Why on earth does the failure to load / execute a javascript result in a catastrophic mis-rendering of a given web page? Oddly enough, in this one case, Internet Explorer appears to be handling this fine, with the usual javascript failure icon/status in the bottom left of the window. This was with FireFox 2.x, so maybe this is something they’ve gotten fixed on their new version. Either way, all I know is that it’s quite annoying that I have to revert back to IE to view certain pages because of this…