OWA in Firefox not rendering HTML in emails
I know this is very finicky and probably unique to me, but here goes. I run Fedora 26 and Firefox 55.0.3 (although this has been happening since about Firefox 52ish? maybe before) and because I run Linux I can't use Outlook for mail, so I use OWA to get to my work email. Our ticketing system, Request Tracker (RT) sends us emails so we don't have to open RT every time, we can just reply to those emails. It used to be that I could click Reply and I'd get the full conversation history (ya know, like with every email chain you get) and I can just reply on top of that. As of the last few updates however I just get a blank screen. I can still send an email but the conversation history doesn't appear. This only happens with emails from our ticketing system, replying to other emails that actually come from humans appear to work just fine. I can change to a plain text email in OWA and the conversation history appears with all the HTML tags in view, so it just looks like Firefox can't render the HTML anymore. If this had never worked I wouldn't be so upset but since this used to work and then updating broke it one day I'd like the ability back. If you need more information I'll definitely be watching this post and I'll be happy to help.
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As it turns out, it's not just our ticket system, but any email that seems to contain HTML. I got an email from Expedia today and when I tried to forward it all I got was a blank screen. I hate having to open stuff in Chrome but unfortunately that's exactly what I have to do now to get my job done.
Firefox has a known issue with deeply nested HTML tags. It can lead to either a blob of unformatted text or a completely blank area. This is most likely to manifest with messages that are forwarded or pasted over and over. As far as I know, there is no easy workaround because any script you would run to fix the page encounters the same problem (the script doesn't have access to the deeply nested content, either).
Previous threads on that issue:
Although this is not a new issue, if recent versions of Firefox are rendering fewer levels of nesting or are contributing to the tag clutter compared with what actually is in the HTML, that should be filed as a new bug.
Since Firefox is going to have a much faster rendering engine in Firefox 57+ perhaps the developers will increase the depth allowed before quitting. But assuming that is not going to be large enough for every potential case, it also may be time to consider a new failure approach. I'm not sure what to suggest.
I probably should look up the old bugs on this and see if there has been any consideration of that recently...
I apologize for asking a duplicate question. I did some searching around before I posted this to try to find an answer but I mainly limited my searches to OWA because I thought that was the culprit. It's strange that at one point I had a Firefox that didn't have this issue, but I guess it's more likely that someone at Microsoft changed the way OWA HTML is formatted causing the depth issue. I've tried the new beta, but it still seems to have the same issue. Given it's a beta though I know that it will continue to change, so I'll keep an eye on it.
I opened the F12 inspector on a message that was blank (but shouldn't be) and it looks like once we descend the 13 div's to get to the message body, there's an iframe and it starts all over again with a new set of html tags. I could understand why there might be a depth issue with this now. This has now gone out of my bailiwick, if any dev wants to reach out to me for testing I'll be happy to help but writing browser code definitely isn't my strong point.
No worries about asking a new question which has the underlying issue of a different question, especially when something hasn't been fixed for several years.
I think it's too late to consider major new changes to Firefox 57; it's probably just going to get clean-ups on planned changes. However, Firefox 58, due out in January 2018, could still get a fix...
After further research:
Currently, there is a limit of 200 nesting levels. After that is reached, what you see depends on the layout of the page. If the rest of the content is NOT in a table, you see a plain text dump of it, without any style or layout. However, if it is in a table, it is not shown at all. I think that is the problem with the email sites.
There is work ongoing to increase the nesting cut-off to about 500 levels, which should cover most cases. However, I don't understand the rest of the developers' discussion, so I can't tell whether this work is close to being finished or some ways off.