Sometimes it is reported that in certain instances the dropdown menus of the smartform or lightbox appear to be blank when installed on certain websites.
Here’s some of the most common threads of this misbehavior:
- It appears to only happen in the chrome browser
- It appears to only happen in scenarios with more than one monitor
- It appears to happen in websites where the HTML markup of “div’s” containing the ResponsiBid embed code are using absolute positioning.
- It appears that the problem is only in practice, the actual code inspector still shows that everything is fine and there are no indications that anything is “technically or theoretically wrong”
The problem is that the text for the dropdowns (which are native browser inputs!) is just WAYYYYY off to the left. And not properly positioned inside of the perfectly positioned dropdown menu… We have no true solution to this, even though once a machine displays this behavior it can reliably be reproduced every single time on at least one of the monitors, but rarely both. The issue results in a certain subset of users who visit your website will experience this behavior and there is no way to protect against it.
We see 2 solutions to try:
- You can use the code injection option to try to dress up the page that the smartform installs on and then directly link all links to the “instant quote feature” to the stand alone Smartform as instructed here. The effect here is that you will not have to worry about your website having any effects on the smartform or breaking the menus because you’ll be linking to a page completely off of your site to fill out the ResponsiBid form. This is the most sure way to get the right performance, and will produce results without question right away.
- You can try to eliminate “absolute” positioned divs that in any way contain the ResponsiBid installation. We currently have no proof that this will work it is only a working hypothesis, but we do believe that if you want ResponsiBid to be naturally installed on your website this is the tact to try. Keep in mind that divs tend to nest inside one another so you will want to look through your entire hierarchy of divs to be sure that they are all eliminated. The difficult part of this task is that you need a web developer to work on your website, as well as a way to reproduce the bug on your end which has proven problematic. If you decide to build an all-new website for whatever reason, just be sure to be testing this aspect all along the way to ensure it’s working right.
We wish we could get our hands around this bug and we’ve invested many hours to debugging it, but it appears to be a very strange quirk of Chrome with absolutely no sign of improper use of code, or any errors. It’s just a terrible side effect of some unknown perfect alignment of conditions. We have plans in the future to allow ResponsiBid to be installed in a way that renders within your website’s code (not in an iframe) which should do away with this issue. There is no ETA for that solution though.