use/defs does not work. In Safari 3.1 (525.21) it can cause the browser to crash, and Chromium 4 (532.6) and Epiphany-webkit (531.2) render use elements at the original position, ignoring x and y offsets. Example showing the rendering issue: http://www.selfsvg.info/content/listings/use_example.svg (should look like http://www.selfsvg.info/content/images/use_example.png). Example showing the browser crash: http://dev.openlayers.org/releases/OpenLayers-2.8/examples/graphic-name.html (select the button with the 4 arrows, click on a polygon, and move the vertices, watch browser crash after moving the mouse around a bit).
Easy fix: use other language settings: export LANG="C" for example. We already have bug reports for this. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 18994 ***
The link provided for the browser crash was incorrect. The correct one is http://dev.openlayers.org/releases/OpenLayers-2.8/examples/snapping.html
After switching my numeric locale from de_AT to en_US, I experience the browser crashing on all of the mentioned browsers. So I think there must actually be two different issues. Unfortunately I am not able to provide a stripped down test case, but I can confirm that this issue goes away when not using defs/use.