I could show you the whole screen . . . but then I'd have to kill you.

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One the most difficult issues I've experienced while playing Mafia Wars on Yahoo! is that of the screens not displaying entirely.  There are a lot of long screens in Mafia Wars; lists of loot, lists of jobs, lists of achievements, etc.  On each of these, you have to scroll down to see the stuff at the bottom.  That all works well enough on Facebook.  But for some reason, here on Yahoo!, the long screens all get cut off.  You simply can't see the lower part of the screen, and there are no scroll bars that will take you there.


At first, after the Nov 2010 re-launch, the problem wasn't quite as bad in IE.  Job lists had a scroll bar so you could get to the bottom.  Google Chrome didn't have the scroll bar, so you had to select the screen text and drag downward to get the lower part of the screen to come into view.  That's not a feature designed by Zynga, it's a pretty nasty workaround using the capabilities of the browser.  Worst of all was Firefox, which didn't have scroll bars, and in which the drag/select workaround didn't work.  So -- it would have made sense to use IE instead of Firefox or Chrome except for all of the other crippling problems the game had in IE.  But that's a post for another day.

Having screens get cut off is a real problem for game play.  If you can't see something, you can't click on it.  And if you can't click, you can't play.  Simple as that.  So I submitted a support case to Zynga early on.  After the usual Zynga runarounds about clearing my cache and uninstalling the app, they admitted there was a problem that "the developers know about".  Whatever -- just fix it, will you?

They did fix it.  Sort of.  For a while.  Google Chrome still didn't work, but in Firefox the screen length would automatically adjust so that all of the screen content would display.  That is, unless you got into the game by clicking on a game notification.  Then it would revert to the old behavior.

Anyway, for a while it was a lot more playable.  If the screen wasn't long enough, getting out of the game and then back in through "My Apps" would solve the problem.  Yay!

But today, whatever fix Zynga had implemented has gone AWOL, and I'm back to having all my screens cut off in my favorite browser; Firefox.  Google Chrome isn't any better.  Maybe it works better in IE, but the game runs so slowly in IE that I can't stand to play it.

It's back to Zynga support, I guess.  Should I clear my cache now, or wait until they ask me to do it?


More: http://www.hsengine.com/s_Google+Chrome+Apps.html