Re: cropping doesn’t work well…
I do know what you mean!
I’ve tried recreating your problem. I develop on a Mac and cannot replicate this issue in either Safari of Firefox (tried multiple versions of both). I’m running WPMU 2.7 and BP r1286.
Are you developing locally? Or are you on a remote server?
Has this always been an issue? Or could you properly crop before but not since a recent BuddyPress update?
I also assume that you cleared your browser’s cache and cookies, relaunched your browser and tried again. In years past, some people had issues with avatar cropping in IE. That trick seemed to usually work. However, since you’re also seeing this behavior in Firefox, that’s probably not what’s happening here.
Finally, which version of PHP are you running? Can you also check which version of the GD library is installed?