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Firefox? Bah Humbug, I say

Tags:
HTML,
IE,
Firefox

John Carroll Special to ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 04 Nov 2004 18:28 GMT

Firefox has been getting a lot of press lately. Firefox is free software in the Stallman-sanctioned sense -- released under a GPL licence and built atop technology developed for the Mozilla project. Everybody loves Firefox. Not only is it a great browser, but it will make your teeth whiter and secure you a date with Carmen Electra.

Okay, perhaps I exaggerate, but on that note, I haven't seen anyone criticise Firefox. To a certain extent, this is because it is the best alternative in a world dominated by Internet Explorer (cue Opera/Safari/Konqueror fans to go into a frothing rage). On the other hand, as I can personally attest, it is politically incorrect in the extreme to criticise anything stamped with the open-source moniker.

In short, though Firefox is a good browser, political considerations have allowed it to escape some deserved criticism. Firefox supporters make some rather costly demands of Web sites, particularly given that it commands such a small, albeit growing, share of the browser marketplace. Recent feverish Firefox support pieces aside, I still think that ignoring IE's non-standard features will prove a large, and unnecessary, barrier to the success of the best alternative to Internet Explorer.

Experience providing support for Firefox
As a certain square-jawed actor might have said had he been abducted by aliens and forced to write software, "the experience of one programmer doesn't amount to hill of beans in this crazy world." Even so, for a browser that touts its support for HTML standards, I was surprised to find that it had difficulty with standard HTML.

Check out this link under Internet Explorer, and then Firefox. I have created a Web page with a fixed position left, top and bottom sidebar that surrounds a scrollable area. All regions resize to completely fill the browser when its dimensions are changed.

To make this work, I have a table which lays out the basic position of the main sections (left bar, top bar, bottom bar, content). I've placed a div tag inside the "content" area of the table, setting its width and height to 100 percent and adding automatic scrollbars by setting the "overflow" CSS attribute to "auto".

None of this is rocket science. Some might object to the use of tables, which in CSS circles might seem so 1990s. I couldn't care less. Tables are easy to use, are immediately intuitive to this old HTML hand-coder, and most important, have existed since the early days of HTML. Regardless of your preferences, there is no reason they shouldn't work.

Editor's note: Firefox has been given a 99 percent approval rating by over 500 ZDNet readers in our Downloads section. You can rate it yourself there, or Talkback to this comment piece below.