Firefox 3 was released a few days ago and so far as a surfer I have enjoyed the experience. But as a web developer it is starting to cause me headaches.

It seems that FF3 cannot stretch a div that has overflow auto to the full length of the content. I check this with really long lists and got this output.

When I change the overflow attribute to hidden the div stretched as it should. IE7 though not my main browser has no problem with this code. I stopped using IE a long time ago but it seems that I am always forced back to using it to check on bugs in Firefox! Firefox always claims to have the faster browser and the one that is most standards compliat. The problem is it comes at the cost of many irritating bugs that I would trade standards compliance for any day.

Years ago I found a bug in Firefox where numbers on ordered lists would not iterate. It took two years? and hundreds of unwanted emails from the bug tracker before it was finally fixed. I still get those emails now and again.

I seem to always stumble upon these Firefox bugs and have to wonder when people say that FF fixes bugs faster. Just not true. While there may be an effort to fix security bugs, those other bugs, the ones that you can see and annoy you always seem to hang around. This is the same as it is with IE so no matter how you slice it the IE and FF are really evil twins. It's just that both are evil.

Happy Publishing!

Ten years of experience in web development. Carl is looking for in employment as a Senior PHP/mySQL Developer in Stockholm.
Carl McDade - Systems Developer