ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
eBay staff recommends Chrome in all cases, so they are designing specifically to Google Chrome. Unfortunately, because Google is in the business of collecting data (snooping), that browser has been banned from all of our business computers, and only the open-source Firefox and Brave are used. eBay also recommends using incognito mode when pages don't display correctly, so I assume incognito mode spoofs Chrome behavior.
I have occasionally seen the stylesheet problem while using Firefox, where the description window is a tall strip only 2" wide.
- I run Firefox with no add-ons (the latest version).
- Advanced tracking protection is ON for this site.
- Enhanced Tracking protection is "Standard".
- The browser has not set any exceptions to the Advanced Tracking protection.
The iFrame containing that description does not fit the width of the rest of eBay's page, indicating either a script or a stylesheet fails to load or function, or loads/runs too late to fix the size of the description frame. When I see a that skinny strip, a page reload solves the problem, which tells me that the code did not run the first time (or had loaded too late) and was cached and ready to run as the page reloads.
I have not paid enough attention to actually do any troubleshooting, so I'll pay more attention next time I run across it.
Ditto, I only recently encountered the problem, but my new system has only been in place for about three months. My FF updated a day or two ago, so I'll watch for increased issues (usually I don't scroll down as far as the description, so wouldn't really know the frequency of the issue).
eBay does not use "Java" on any customer-facing pages. The last time it was used that way was almost 20 years ago for a few listing tools, like a category selector. At that time, and for a few years thereafter, eBay had a small third-party acknowledgement at the top of its pages along the lines of "Java, Powered by Sun" (when eBay moved from IBM servers to Sun servers). But that was for eBay's back-end server, not for anything accessed by a browser, and we eventually got eBay to remove that because of all the "Update Java" misinformation it was provoking.
Nonetheless, for perhaps 15 more years, we continued to see the suggestion from fellow sellers that "update your Java" would solve eBay problems. It won't, because Java is not a part of eBay's browser interface. However, there was some indication from some users a decade ago that updating Java would somehow force other, more important, updates to the browser. In any event, that would just be coincidental to the solution and not at all related to Java.
Additionally, many erroneously assumed that "Java" was the same as "JavaScript", the latter being a built-in feature of modern browsers that is an entirely different animal than Java. Before the turn of the century, JavaScript was a browser module that could be updated independently of the browser, but by the 21st century JavaScript was an integral and inseparable part of the browser. To update JavaScript would require updating the browser itself, so a more accurate admonishment would have been to "update your browser" (which is still a valid suggestion today).
I thought I would throw a little history out there to finally put a nail in the "Java" misinformation coffin.
