Hi Jack,
i have figured out the problem with the identical taxanomic classifications. It seems that you cannot open two different organism overviews without the second one imposing it's tax classification on the first.
This is not a browser issue, but caused by the way how the RAST Server exchanges information with the SeedViewer. Since this technology is inherited from the regular RAST server which focuses on annotations of single organisms, the comparison of two (metagenome) RAST jobs _at the same time_ is not yet sufficiently covered. As soon as you open a SeedViewer from the mg-RAST Job Details page, this SeedViewer provides you the views for this metagenome. Unfortunately when you open another SeedViewer from a different Job Details page, your SeedViewer pages will display the data from that metagenome from there on. This is a known problem we are about to address with the upcoming release of the SeedViewer 2.0.
very odd...but appears to be a brower issue? I use firefox as many of the gifs wonn't open in IE.
We did some testing for Internet Explorer and have fixed the problem with graphics not loading in the new release. For now the best browser to use is firefox.