We installed the latest version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer yesterday, after it had seen official realease on Tuesday. After noticing a host of problems it was causing on our website (http://www.simunix.com) with whole blocks of content completely vanishing, we narrowed the problem down to the following CSS declaration:
h2 {
font-family:helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
}
If applied to body, or html then the entire page vanishes as can be seen at http://validator.w3.org – Massive bug!
Changing the CSS declaration to put arial before helvetica in the font stack solves the problem, which seems to only occur on machines that have Helvetica installed. We are not sure whether it is a specific version of this font causing this problem or whether all machines with Helvetica installed are affected.
I’ve let the Microsoft team know on Twitter but no response yet… You can view a test page at:
I also found the same problem with a beta release of IE9 a few months ago, and was horrified to see that the released version which came out this week also failed to render the helvetica font, and indeed anything contained within tags which have helvetica associated with them. If it helps you, the helvetica font I have installed on my machine is a .pfm file. The file contains no version number. It affects IE9 on both Vista and Windows 7.
Like yourselves, I corrected it on our website http://www.caslte-caretech.com by moving helvetica so that it was not the first font in the list.
Hope Microsoft sort this out soon.
Aaaaaaaaaaah!!! You saved the day with this fix! Thank you! Hahahahha! What a crazy bug!
The problem is not Helvetica itself, but Helvetica Type 1 font format on win7. removing the type 1 format and reinstalling a helvetica open type face worked for me