ebola cola

I’ve never tried to hide my growing dislike of Firefox. There are several reasons for that, from the exaggerated hype surrounding the new release (while both Opera and Safari have let their latest version out almost without a word), to the substandard performance and quality it has out of the box.

Granted, there’s a flourishing community of third-party developers anxious to release many more plugins for Fx than we’d ever need. If it’s on the web, there’s porn of it, and there’s also a Fx plugin of sort for it. Opera has widgets, but they don’t offer the flexibility of the plugins, and then “dude, Firefox is open source”!

Anyway, the basic version of Fx delivers much less quality than a similar installation of the other two browsers. Months ago, when I’ve been shortly blogging in an Italian site, I posted screenshots of Firefox and Opera trying to navigate from the connection at my office: while Opera took a look around and detected the proxy settings in a heartbeat, all that Fx was able to do was declaring the network out of reach.

One would think that Firefox 3, the new Messiah, has no similar flows. Ok, adding a bunch of plugins may cause undesired effects, but a clean install would be perfect.

Let’s suppose that I make an XHTML page with a handful of divs.  Let’s also suppose that I link an external CSS to it. Let’s also suppose that the CSS just contains file size, font face information and a red color, just to see that the link works. Finally, let’s imagine that I copy the page skeleton from a working page, one whose style is correctly rendered in all the major browsers.

Here is what happens in said conditions in Internet Explorer, Opera 9.27, Safari 3.1.2… and Firefox 3. Opera is my browser of choice, but it just had a few saved passwords and maybe a couple of bookmarks; the other three browsers were all in their original unaltered state.

Now, the CSS stated that most elements should have no border, no margin and no padding, and that text in elements in the body should be red, Trebuchet or Arial or another sans serif font, and 12 pixels high. Nothing more than that.

While I may accept the hypothesis that I did something wrong (even though the link tag in the head of my page is exactly the same as the one in a page that renders correctly), this evidence shows that not only the “good” Opera and Safari, but also the “evil” IE knows what to do with both the markup and the style sheet, but Firefox has got no clue as to what to do. Considering that 98% of the sites on the Internet is not properly designed, this is a serious issue for the browser that wishes to be a threatening alternative to the Microsoft ubiquitous web client.

Firefox is a great browser, they say, but it seems like it doesn’t listen…