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Old Firefox Gripes See also the main Firefox gripes page and web sites that Firefox does not display correctly

To keep the size of my main Firefox gripes page reasonable, my gripes with version 0.9 and earlier are here. 

Topics Below:  Gripes with v0.9   0.8->0.9 New Problems   0.8->0.9 Remaining Problems   0.8->0.9 Fixed Problems  JavaScript Gripes  Assorted Gripes  Things IE does, that Firefox does not   Problems Displaying Web Pages

Gripes with Version 1.0

February 16, 2005. Browser URL Spoofing Vulnerability by Patrick Douglas Crispen. An excellent article about dealing with a known bug in Firefox. 

February 8, 2005. Three More Bugs Found In Firefox And Mozilla from Information Week magazine. Fixes have been implemented, but they haven't been rolled into a patch or a new version that can be downloaded and used without recompiling the code. 

February 4, 2005. I tried to use Yahoo Chat which has three choices for client software with IE but is limited to a Java chat client when used with Firefox. Twice, the Java applet failed to load. It causes Firefox to loop, burning 98% of the cpu. Clicking the Stop button does not stop Firefox from looping, it has to be killed with Task Manager. My copy of Firefox is otherwise perfectly functional with Java according to my Java Tester web site (see below item).  

February 3, 2005. On my Java Tester web site, I changed the test for whether Java is enabled in your web browser. There is a bug in the way Firefox deals with the Applet tag when Java is not enabled and another bug in the way Firefox with the Adblock extension displays the output of the Java applet. The  Java Tester site has more on this. 

February 1, 2005. Quote from Browser Alternatives: Beyond Internet Explorer  by Jason Cross at ExtremeTech January 25, 2005: "There is no security code problem with Firefox's Extensions feature that we know of, but it behaves in a very unsafe manner. You can install plug-ins directly from the web, which is very user-friendly, but unsigned extensions are given the same treatment as signed ones. The default choice is "install," even if the extension is a harmful piece of Spyware, a Trojan, or a keyboard logger." 
My two cents: For the best safety with Firefox, don't let web sites install software. In Firefox, do: Tools -> Options -> Web Features and turn off the option "Allow web sites to install software". The down side is that you will have to remember to turn this option back on before installing an extension or the extension will not install. 

January 28, 2005. When you install Firefox it defaults to using a special Google Firefox web page as the home page. Should you decide to use another web page (or a blank page) as your home page there is no going back. Nothing documents this default browser home page. It is not an option in Tools -> Options -> General -> Home Page Location. It is not one of the pre-supplied Bookmarks. There is no mention of it on the default Firefox home page at mozilla.org. Note too that the default Firefox home page is not Firefox Central which can be accessed by clicking the round circle of dots in the top right corner. 

January 26, 2005. Firefox flaw raises phishing fears ZDNet (UK) January 7, 2005. A bug in Firefox 1.0 allows hackers to spoof the URL (web page address) in the download dialog box. This can conceal the true source of files being downloaded to your computer. As of today, 19 days after this article appeared, there is nothing on the Mozilla.org home page or the Firefox home page about this. 

January 25, 2005. One page got hung up loading. I clicked on the New Tab button and the new tab opened, not with my usual default of a blank page, but instead opened with the URL of the web page that had gotten hung.  The hung web page caused all new tabs to fail, even when I manually entered a URL of a web site that IE could load just fine. 

January 14, 2005. Firefox works well with the scroll wheel of my mouse, except for Print Preview mode. At times, the scroll wheel works in Print Preview mode and at times it does not. I haven't narrowed down the problem yet, but it seems as if the problem happens around a page break. 

January 11, 2005. Scrolling. With IE, if the browser window has focus you can use the wheel on a mouse to scroll the page. Period. Notso with Firefox. If the mouse pointer slips to the extreme left or right side of the browser window, then Firefox considers it out of range and the wheel no longer scrolls the page until it is moved horizontally.  

January 8, 2005. Tracking cookies: I always run Firefox with the option to not allow third party cookies. Despite this, many such cookies get installed. The specific options is Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> Allow sites to set cookies -> "for the originating web site only". I suspect this may be due to the use of iFrames. 

January 5, 2005. A link on a web page pointed to a PDF file. I right clicked on it and said to open the link in a new tab. The Adobe Acrobat 6 splash screen displays for a long time. During this time, Firefox does not let you re-focus the display to any other tab. 
Update: See my Adobe Acrobat Reader gripes for some tips on speeding up the load time. January 28, 2005. 

December 13, 2004. A VC and Ed Bott wrote about pop-ups that get through the Firefox defenses. 

December 6, 2004. While viewing a PDF document in Firefox, I click on the floppy disk icon to save it on my computer. Then I can't navigate the "Save a copy" dialog box that opens because Firefox is burning 99% of the cpu. This spike in processor usage lasts only a few seconds, but it occurs before I clicked on the SAVE button to actually start saving the file. 

December 5, 2004. The status line at the bottom of the screen is not per tab, but per browser window. That is, as I shift from one tab to another, the status bar does not shift along with me. I know this because too often the status bar says something such as "transferring data from data.coremetrics.com...". Even though the page in question has finished loading, this message remains. And it remains on all pages in all tabs. Even after the tab that caused the message to be displayed is closed and there is only one remaining web page, the status bar still shows a "transferring data from xxx" message. 

December 4, 2004. To repeat an old gripe: The View->Source in Firefox invokes a read-only view of the underlying HTML. I much prefer IE which opens the source in Notepad allowing for quick changes. 

RSS: Firefox offers the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, but this feature strikes me as not yet fully baked. 

• It does not pick up all RSS feeds and when I looked at Mozilla's documentation they did not say what a webmaster has to do so that Firefox will detect there is an RSS feed for a site.
• The feed only displays the titles, not the summaries that a full RSS reader also provides  
• You are not told when the feed is updated, let alone given control over the update schedule. Is it Daily? Hourly? Every time you start Firefox? Dial-up users especially might like some control over this to save bandwidth.  
• While looking at an article on CNETs news page I subscribed to their feed. The feed name was the name of the article I was looking at when it was, in fact, a feed for all of CNET not just one article. This is because the default name used for the RSS bookmark (they use the term "Live Bookmark" instead of the more obvious "RSS bookmark" which is what it is) is the page title. Instead Firefox should have used the name of the RSS feed which it already knows (when you click on the RSS feed icon in the bottom right corner, the feed name is displayed). 
• The RSS feed bookmarks look like normal bookmarks, but they are not. I would have preferred them to be segregated by default, perhaps in a dedicated folder. 

December 3, 2004. Saving a web page as a single .MHT file seems to be faster in IE. Once while saving a page, Firefox started looping, consuming 98% of the cpu, and had to be cancelled with Task Manager. 

December 2, 2004. Secrets of Firefox 1.0 By Brian Livingston.  The article is mostly about hidden Firefox configuration options. It does, however, include a Windows XP fix for a big gripe of mine, that Firefox loads very slowly. Just yesterday I used Firefox on a machine with insufficient RAM for the first time. It took a very long time for the Firefox window to be restored after it had been minimized to the task bar. It turns out this is a known problem, it's discussed in the article along with a fix. 

December 1, 2004. When you download a file with Firefox, the download progress window is very slow in opening. This has been true for the last couple releases at least. Sometimes the download finishes before the window even opens. Thunderbird (the email program) is 5.8 MB download. It was half finished today before the download window showing the progress of the download opened (this with a cable modem connection). 

Another problem is that the download manager window sometimes never appears. In Tools -> Options -> Downloads, I have these options set
   --Ask me where to save every file is ON
   --Show download manager window when a download begins in ON 
   --Close Download Manager when all downloads are complete is OFF 
Despite this, the download manager window is sometimes never displayed. 

November 30, 2004. It used to be that when I clicked on a link in an email message in Thunderbird, a new Firefox window opened.  Click 3 times, get 3 Firefox windows. After upgrading from 1.0PR to 1.0 however, I now get a single Firefox window and the second click on a link overlays the web page from the first click. This is fixable with Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Tabbed browsing. The default for "Open Links from Other Applications in" was "the most recent tab/window". You can change this to either a new window or a new tab in current window.  

November 23, 2004. Getting the Most Out of Firefox by Brian Livingston in Datamation. This article documents some gripes with Firefox and work-arounds for them. Quoting: "I'm a great advocate of Windows users switching from IE to Firefox . . .  But erstwhile IE users will run into a few, um, issues when they switch to the new kid on the block." Included is a big gripe of mine, that Firefox can't make MHT files. With an extension, it can. 

Gripes with Version 1.0 Preview Release

November 23, 2004. Getting the Most Out of Firefox by Brian Livingston in Datamation describes some gripes such as: Saved Passwords Aren't Encrypted By Default, Display Size Preference Isn't Saved, No Automatic Adjustment of Print Size and No "Save As Single File."

November 5, 2004. The Download application is very slow. There is an annoyingly long delay between clicking on the Download toolbar button and having the download window open. Also, when downloading a file, there is a long delay between when the download starts and the download window opens. Sometimes the download completes before the progress window even opens. 

October 8, 2004. Printing: I often use Print Preview before printing a web page to see if I can avoid printing the last page which sometimes has nothing but an ad. Twice today I used Print Preview, decided not to print the last page, told Firefox to print all the pages except for the last one and it printed the last page anyway. One time it hung saying it was generating the printed output, despite the fact that it did print the pages in question. 

October 6, 2004. A bug fix was released on October 1, 2004. My gripes are: 

• When you start to install the bug fix from this web page you first get a  "software installation" pop-up window showing the location of the fix. However, the location is long and the window is small, so the location is truncated. The window is not resizable either. 
• The web page for the bug fix says that after the download and installation of the fix, you should restart Firefox. It does not however tell you when the download and installation is done. In fact, nothing makes it obvious when the installation has been completed. You end up at a window that lists the currently installed extensions. Never mind this is a bug fix, not an extension. Nothing in the window showing your extensions says anything at all about the bug fix you just installed. 
• The Firefox home page says nothing about the just released bug fix. It is only mentioned on the Mozilla home page 
• My copy of Firefox was set to automatically check for updates to Firefox. Five days after this fix was released, it had not told me anything. I ran across the fix by accident. And how does it tell you? Don't know. Someone said there is a red icon that appears but when he saw it, he had no idea the significance of it. 
• On a Windows XP computer, I did a manual Check For Updates and it found the pending bug fix. Fine. I clicked on the Install Now button and the download and install ran forever. I was looking at the Firefox Update window where it said it was installing updates. The message "Now downloading and installing updates..." appeared for well over 10 minutes. The download, considering its size and the speed of the net connection, should have taken only a few seconds. The problem was a Firefox configuration option. Tools -> Options -> Web Features -> "Allow web sites to install software" was not enabled. October 10, 2004.  

October 4, 2004. Title tags: Firefox truncates long Title tags, IE does not. For example hover your mouse

September 30, 2004. Print Preview and printing is still buggy. This page printed without its heading. This web page was said to print as one page but actually printed as two - the heading printed on a page by itself. 

September 27, 2004. Window 98SE and also Windows 2000 SP4. At jumble.com playing the game requires the Macromedia Shockwave Player. It failed to be installed automatically on two copies of Firefox on two different machines on two different days. The error window, shown at the right, is resizable despite the lack of the usual standard visual clues that are supposed to indicate a window is resizable. I needed to resize the window to see it completely. There is a "manual install" button which I clicked on and it caused the download of an EXE file. Then what? Nothing said what to do next. My obvious question is whether the downloaded file can or should be run with Firefox running or shut down? I guessed that Firefox should be shut down and that worked. Shockwave was also installed however, in two other browsers on my computer. 

September 24, 2004. Windows 98SE. IBM's web site uses Java applets on many pages, among them this page about their ThinkCentre A series. The specific applet in this case is
 <applet codebase="//www.pc.ibm.com/us/hero/desktops/tca/Jars" archive="holomatix1.jar,holomatix2.jar" code="blaze3d.class">
Firefox offered to find a plug-in to process this object but when I tried to do so, it failed to find "a suitable plugin".  

September 23, 2004. Live Bookmarks are a poor man's RSS reader. The feature only displays the title of an RSS entry, nothing else. No date. No body text. 

September 18, 2004. Windows 2000 SP4. I uninstalled Firefox version 0.93 using the Control Panel Add/Remove programs thingy. As part of the un-install it asks if you want to completely remove the Firefox directory. I said yes. Then I installed v1.0 PR and was warned about "components that are not compatible with the new version of Firefox". Two gripes: 1. They are either "components" or "extensions". Mozilla should chose one name and stick to it. 2. How do you really really un-install. Not only did the extensions/components get carried over to the new version, so too did the Bookmarks and the customization I had done to the toolbars. I don't like a program that you can really un-install, a problem that has plagued Norton Anti-Virus for years

Gripes with Version 0.9

September 4, 2004. Windows XP Home with all bug fixes except for SP2. The computer had v0.9.0 which I uninstalled (I did not delete the Firefox directory when asked if I wanted to). I then downloaded and installed the current version, 0.9.3 (opting not to install the Quality Feedback Agent).  After the installation, you are asked it you want to run Firefox now. I said yes but it didn't run. Task Manager showed a Firefox process, but the browser never appeared. I cancelled the process and started the browser again. Same thing. Un-installing v0.9.3, deleting its home directory and re-installing v0.9.3 fixed the problem. 

August 25, 2004. I tried to install a new theme and it failed. Starting at the page for the Qute 2.1.2 theme, I clicked on Install Now. It opened the Firefox theme window but the only thing there was the default theme. I shut down Firefox and tried it again. Same thing. 

August 12, 2004. As per the below, there is now a version 0.93. What's new in this version as opposed to 0.92 or 0.91? Beats me. If this information is on the Firefox web site, I couldn't find it. It should be front and center. 
Update: August 31, 2004. A reader pointed me to these Mozillazine articles on the new releases:  0.9  0.9.1   0.9.2    0.9.3  (thanks Glen)

August 2, 2004. Nowhere on the main Firefox page or the release notes does it say, in plain simple English, what the latest version of the product is. This is documentation done by people too close to the task at hand an unable to see things from the perspective of an un-involved person. Anyone running 0.8 or 0.9 or 0.91 would be very hard pressed to learn that 0.9.2 is the latest version. 

July 27, 2004. Mozilla to squash security bugs By Paul Festa CNET News.com Web surfers eyeing Mozilla-based browsers as a safer alternative might want to wait a week before making the switch.

July 23, 2004. Find text in a web page: Paul Thurrott described how Firefox finds text in a web page. Sounds neat. It doesn't work for me however. I see none of the features he describes at all. In my copy of Firefox 0.9.2, finding text in a page works exactly as it does in Internet Explorer. Turns out that he was using a post-0.9.2 nightly build of Firefox. In English, a newer copy of Firefox, which also has the new pop-up blocking behavior he describes. 

July 21, 2004. This article mentions that OnFolio does not work with Firefox: Why Firefox Beats Internet Explorer by Preston Gralla July 13, 2004 on O'Reilly Net

July 20, 2004. Download manager. I like to leave the Download Manager displayed after a file has finished downloading. Despite my setting the option to do this (Tools -> Options -> Downloads -> "Close the Download Manager when all downloads are complete" is OFF) it still often closes after a file is downloaded (not consistent). 

July 12, 2004. There is a configuration option that, I assume, is designed to suppress ads on web sites. It is available from:
    Tools  -> Options -> Web Features -> Load Images -> for the originating Web site only 

It does not seem to be all that useful. For one thing, it has no effect on Flash based ads. The first site I tried this on, Yahoo, had all the images suppressed. Images on Yahoo's home page load from yimg.com and without them, the page and site are drastically different. To fix cases like this, there is a Permissions button (Tools->Options->Web Features) that seems like it is designed to let you make exceptions. That is, to let you specify web sites where the images always load. It doesn't work. You can't add a web site to the list of allowed sites, only remove one. 
Finally, trying to block ads this way breaks something else. When you do Tools -> Page Info -> Media tab, the images are previewed when you click on them. This previewing does not work when Firefox is configured to display images for the originating web site only.
Update: An alternative is the adblock extension (thanks Glenn) which give you quite a bit of control over, not just images, but also iframes, scripts, Java and Flash. The latest version works with Firefox 0.9 and Mozilla 1.7. 

Older Gripes with Version 0.9

July 11, 2004. Identifying Firefox as Firefox: It is hard to impossible to get a feeling for how popular Firefox is because programs that report this information from web server log files may not be updated yet to detect Firefox. On a web site of mine (not this one) a popular program called Analog (v5.32) is used to generate statistics. Below is the browser report. Which one, if any, is Firefox? Beats me. I asked tech support at the web site hosting company and they couldn't figure out where Firefox ends up in the Analog browser reports. The last version of Analog (change log), was a beta from August 2003, when Firefox was called either Phoenix or Firebird. 

FYI: Any web browser identifies itself in three ways. To the web server, it offers a "user agent". For example, Firefox 0.9.1 under Windows 2000 shows up like this to a web server: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.9.1. To client side JavaScript, the navigator object represents your web browser and has appName and an appVersion properties. For Firefox, the appName is Netscape and the appVersion is 5.0 (Windows; en-US)  (under Windows 2000).
Everyone can see the identifying string their web browser provides to web servers at the IP Chicken site.
If JavaScript is enabled in your browser, then it will display these fields below:

July 9, 2004. There was just a new version of Firefox released, 0.9.2 that fixes a bug. The Release Notes say nothing about v0.9.2 and they were also never updated for v0.9.1. The Firefox home page, sill refers to v0.9.1 and never said anything specific about the 0.9.1 release. Some digging turned up a news page for Mozilla which is not specific to Firefox but seems to be the only place with the latest Firefox news. There is no reference to this page on the Firefox home page, if you didn't go to the Mozilla home page, you'd never know. 
   Security hole found in Mozilla browser  July 8, 2004, CNET News.com
   Mozilla Flaw Lets Links Run Arbitrary Programs by Larry Seltzer in eWeek July 8, 2004 
   What Mozilla users should know about the shell: protocol security issue from the folks behind Firefox. July 8, 2004. 
Translation from marketing buzzwords to English: In the article titles above, the words "hole" and "issue" really mean "problem", "bug", "mistake", "boo-boo", etc. 

July 9, 2004. Installing the bug fix for the shell problem (the thing that defines the difference between 0.9.1 and 0.9.2): It didn't work for me. When I clicked on the link to install the patch (on this page) nothing happens. There is supposed to be a Software Installation window that pops up, but no. I figured it out though. Version 0.9 introduced a new undocumented option: 
   Tools -> options -> advanced -> software update -> allow web sites to install software 
No knowing what this is, I had previously turned it off. Turning it on, enabled the bug fix to install itself. 
A related problem: After installing this zap, Help->About still shows version 0.9.1 but the browser is functionally equivalent to v0.9.2. 
FYI: The blog at invisibill.net has instructions on how to make the same Firefox zap without using an XPI file. 

FYI: The bug fix is a file called shellblock.xpi. It is not signed. While I'm not familiar with XPI files, this can not be a good thing. 
Update: A reader of this page (thanks Bill) pointed out that signed XPI files are just like other signed files, they guarantee the file has not been tampered with. Even though a file is signed, it can still be malicious. If you trust downloading the browser from mozilla.org, then the same risk is associated with downloading the XPI patch, signed or not. He goes on to note that a signature allows you to place something from a trusted source in an untrusted place, and verify that it hasn't been tampered with. For example, if the XPI file were signed, it could be hosted at assorted mirror sites and the valid signature would show that it's the same file that's on mozilla.org. 

July 9, 2004. Windows Update. No one expects Windows Update to work with Firefox. But at least there should be a warning message. Instead, Firefox 0.9.2 displays a totally blank page. For more on this, see my Firefox web site gripes.

Extensions

July 9, 2004 (Firefox 0.9.1 under Windows XP) My first go-round with Extensions did not go well. Bookmarks -> Extensions takes you to a page on  texturizer.net where there are many old extensions that won't work with v0.9. There should be a dedicated extension page for each version of the browser. I found an extension that says it works with v0.9, Statusbar Clock (by Michael O'Rourke Version: 1.5.1 last updated June 10,2004) that shows the date and time in the status bar. Fairly simple, should be a good starting point. I click the Install Now link (which points to an XPI  file). Nothing happens. Click again. Nothing again. As mentioned elsewhere on this page, v0.9 introduced a new undocumented option: 
     Tools -> options -> advanced -> software update -> allow web sites to install software 
If this is turned off, you can't install an extension.

July 10, 2004. Later I stumbled across another home page for Firefox extensions but it too lists extensions that only work with v0.8.
July 13, 2004. A reader (thanks Glenn) gave me another URL, one that lists only extensions that work with v0.9x of Firefox.
July 21,2004. I stumbled onto yet another Firefox extensions page extensionroom.mozdev.org

July 23, 2004. The entire Extension architecture seems like it is in the early stages of beta test. A reader of this page (thanks Peter) wrote complaining that Firefox allows you to install extensions that are incompatible with your version of the browser or incompatible with another extension. He also notes that this sort of mistake can break Firefox to the point it won't load. In fact, even un-installing and re-installing Firefox will not fix this sort of problem. Safe mode did not help either. The source of extension problems is in the Firefox profile extension folder and apparently this folder is not deleted when the browser is un-installed nor clobbered when it is re-installed. I haven't confirmed this. He also points out that there is no roll-back feature for extensions. 

Article:  Building a Better Mozilla By Michelle Delio in Wired July 7, 2004 is about Mozilla and Firefox extensions. 
Article:  More Extensions for Mozilla By Michelle Delio in Wired July 12, 2004 

July 8, 2004. Opening Two Instances of Firefox: (Eudora pro 6.1.1.1 under Windows XP Professional) Someone I know set up Firefox 0.9 as the Windows default web browser. However, when clicking on a link in Eudora, it opened both Firefox and IE. There is a setting in the eudora.ini file called urlHelper that, when changed to point to Firefox results in two copies of Firefox opening when clicking on a link in an email. Commenting out the value for urlHelper in eudora.ini results in Firefox (the windows default) opening with the URL, but also an error message box opens in Eudora asking what program to use to open the link. 
Update. July 12, 2004. Turns out this is a known Firefox bug in versions 0.9, 0.91 and 0.92 for which there is a fix. See Firefox opens two new windows when opening external links
Update. August 3, 2004. Brian Livingston wrote about a problem with two instances of Firefox when you click on a link in Outlook 2003 and points out a Microsoft KB article on this:  The Locate Link Browser Dialog Box Appears When You Open a Web Link in an E-mail Message

July 7, 2004. (Firefox 0.9.1) I live in New York City where there is a ferry service called New York Water Taxi. On all pages of their web site, except for the home page, the images fail to load with Firefox. It works fine in IE. For more on this, see my Firefox web site gripes. 

The articles on the web site of Windows & .NET Magazine do not display correctly with FF 0.9.1. The ad on the left hand side is chopped off on a 1024x768 screen. For example, see Combined Attack Methods. They also cause a script warning. For more on this, see my Firefox web site gripes. 

June 29, 2004. The integration between Norton AntiVirus 2003 and Firefox is not as strong as with Internet Explorer. There is a test virus available from Eicar as a plain text file. When I click on this link in IE6, NAV 2003 kicks in immediately to tell me it found a virus. Clicking on the link in Firefox 0.9 displays the plain text virus file without a warning from NAV. 

June 19, 2004. You can not use Ipix with Firefox. The web site of the Frick museum in New York City uses Ipix to provide 360 degree photos. Viewing these photos requires downloading and installing an Ipix viewer. Starting here www.frick.org/html/gardens.htm I followed a trail to 
  http://plugins.netscape.com/plug-in_finder.adp?mimetype=application/x-ipix  then 
  http://plugins.netscape.com/moreinfo.adp?PID=11486 then 
  http://www.ipix.com/viewers/plugin.html then 
  http://infomedia.ipix.com/support/download/plugin.shtml and ended up 
  http://www.ipix.com/download/http://www.ipix.com/download/failed_install.shtml 
where I suffered an installation failure with a Status of -210. Some research turned up the fact that Ipix has no viewer for Firefox. 

Update. July 13, 2004. A reader of this site (thanks Joe) wrote to say that Ipix does, in fact, work with Firefox 0.9x. He blamed poor JavaScript browser detection on the Ipix web site for the confusion finding the appropriate plugin. You can download the plugin at www.ipix.com/download/npipx32.xpi. Then start Firefox, do Tools -> Extensions, and drag and drop this .XPI file into the extensions window. Click the "Install" button to install it, shut down Firefox and restart it.

July 5, 2004. There are no specific instructions on upgrading from 0.9 to 0.9.1. I uninstalled 0.9, renamed the folder it was in (see comment below from June 25th) and then installed 0.9.1. The new version picked up all my profile information (home page, bookmarks, JVM, etc). 

July 1, 2004. The status line is not reset as you switch from one tab to another. I tried to download a file but the connection to the web server timed out. The page finished loading and Firefox displayed a message that the connection had timed out. Fine. However, all three tabs (including two tabs having nothing to do with the failed download) still display a message like this in the status bar: "connecting to www.somewebsite.com..."

June 25, 2004. Uninstalling Firefox 0.8 in both Windows XP and Windows 2000 results in the question shown here: "Not all files were uninstalled from the installation directory: Do you want to completely delete this directory"? The documentation does not mention this at all. What to do? Beats me. This has happened to me each time I uninstalled Firefox 0.8. This warning was also issued when I uninstalled 0.9 before installing 0.9.1. 

The first time you run Firefox 0.9 the first thing you see is an Import Wizard. The install instructions in the release notes say nothing about this. 

The installation instructions for moving from 0.8 to 0.9 are disgraceful. No intellectual effort went into this at all. The information you need to know is either missing (see above) or scattered throughout the Release Notes in many different topics (among them the Troubleshooting topic). 

For example, the instructions for uninstalling 0.8 are not in the 0.9 release notes. Instead it has instructions for un-installing 0.9 which are different from 0.8. This is not at all obvious. In reality, you need neither, as the migration involves disabling extensions in 0.8, partially un-installing 0.8, installing 0.9, and then finishing the un-install of 0.8. This is never made clear in the documentation. 

The uninstall instructions mention deleting the "Phoenix" directory. They fail to mention that this should be done for each Windows userid. 

Uninstalling 0.8 did not remove the desktop icon for it nor the entry for it in Start -> Programs. This might be a Windows gripe though.  

June 22, 2004. I installed Firefox 0.9 under Windows 2000 SP3. The machine had no previous version of Firefox, but did have Mozilla 1.4. The first time Firefox ran after it was installed, the Import Wizard ran. I told it import from the first radio button, which I think was Mozilla. The import wizard then said: The following items are currently being imported ... and hung. All three buttons at the bottom of the window were disabled. Task Manager showed that Firefox was not doing anything, so I killed it with Task Manager. 

June 15, 2004. Since I already have v0.8, I would like to be able to run both v0.9 and v0.8 in the same Windows image. The online installation instructions are useless when it comes to this. Quoting: "Do not install Firefox over the top of another Firefox installation. If you want to install Firefox 0.9 into the same folder that you had Firefox 0.8 in, uninstall Firefox 0.8 first." This begs the question, what if you install FF 0.9 into a different folder than 0.8? Will this work? 

When 0.9 was released, there was no documentation on running both 0.8 and 0.9 on the same computer. Can you? Should you? I asked a question about this on the Mozilla forums and got no reply. In the forums at mozillazine.org, I found this item Tutorial: How to upgrade to Firefox 0.9 which instructs you to uninstall 0.8 before installing 0.9. However, my gripe with the online install instructions in the Release Notes is that they don't address the issue of upgrading from 0.8 except with the useless sentence quoted above. And, why are there different upgrade instructions in the forums than in the Release Notes? 

I installed v0.9 under Windows XP. 

• The readme.txt file that comes with FF 0.9 is for Mozilla. The word "Firefox" is nowhere to be found.  
• I opted not to un-install v0.8 before installing v0.9. Since the install instructions said not to clobber 0.8 with 0.9 in the same directory, I installed 0.9 in a new directory. This half works. I can run either 0.8 or 0.9. However, if I start 0.8 and then try to run 0.9, what I get instead is another instance of 0.8. The same works in reverse. That is, once one version is started, that is all that will run, even if you try to start the other version. Both versions will not run at the same time. Later, when I tried to uninstall, 0.8 uninstalled fine but there was a file not found error and 0.9 would not uninstall via the Windows Control Panel Add/Remove Programs thingie. 

June 11, 2004. Firefox 0.9 was released around June 10, 2004. Finding the download file was easy. Finding any installation instructions was impossible. 

0.8 -> 0.9 New Problems

July 23, 2004. Safe Mode. While not really a problem, installing 0.9 adds an item to the Start -> Programs -> Mozilla Firefox group called "Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode)". If there is any documentation on Safe Mode, I haven't run across it. Safe Mode is not mentioned in the Firefox Help file (Help -> Help Contents -> Index or Glossary). 

July 6, 2004. Downloading files with 0.9 is worse than with 0.8. The older release had an option to view the directory that the file was just downloaded to. I found this very handy to virus scan a file before using it. The viewing always started with focus on the just downloaded file. All was well. There is no longer a view directory option in 0.9. Now when you download a file, the only two options are to Open the file (which doesn't allow for virus scanning first) or delete it from the list of downloaded files. 
Update. Two readers of this site pointed out that the ability to open the folder where the just-downloaded file resides still exists in 0.9. It's just hidden. The trick is to right click anywhere in the downloaded files' entry in the Downloads window and select 'Open Containing Folder'. July 7, 2004. 

June 2004. Tools -> options -> advanced has a new option: Allow web sites to install software. What the heck is this? Shades of IE. The Help file says nothing about it at all. There are also new options to automatically check for upgrades to Firefox and for extensions. Again, no documentation at all. 

July 2, 2004. Software updates. By accident, I read that there was an update available to v 0.9.1. Firefox did not tell me. It should have. In the Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Software Update section, my copy of 0.9 was configured to check for updates. Even clicking on the Check Now button did not tell me that there was an update available. 
Update. July 16, 2004. A v0.9.1 copy of Firefox, when told to check for updates, said there were none despite the fact that v0.9.2 had been released. 

June 2004. The toolbar icons are wider and as a result fewer toolbar icons fit across the screen than did with the 0.8 icons. On an 800x600 screen, this is quite noticeable, but you may not be impacted on 1024x768 and higher. Firefox also does not deal with toolbar truncation was well as IE does. It just cuts off the display with no visual indication this has happened. I have seen this on both Windows XP and 2000. On one computer, it chopped the Google box in half and did not display the circular dots icon that takes you to the Firefox home page. The same set icons displayed just fine on that computer with 0.8. 

0.8 -> 0.9 Remaining Problems 

August 25, 2004. With IE you can print a page by right clicking on it. Firefox does not have a Print option on this context menu. It comes in handy on web pages where the chrome has been removed, typically pop-ups. 

July 16, 2004. Firewall: Firefox has a somewhat unusual behavior as far a firewalls go. When you start the browser and go to a web site, ZoneAlarm (the firewall I use) says that Firefox is trying to access the Internet but the IP address is that of my computer, not of a web site. This raises a number of points

• The IP address of 127.0.0.1 is a special reserved one and it always means "me". That is, it always represents your computer. This is the IP address that Firefox is always trying to access, according to ZoneAlarm.  
• Even when the Firefox home page is blank and thus it is not trying to get to the Internet, ZoneAlarm still prompts about permission for Firefox to access 127.0.0.1
• Should you give Firefox permission to access IP address 127.0.0.1 as part of the browser initializing and going to a blank page, ZoneAlarm never asks later, when Firefox actually goes to a web site on the Internet 
• The port numbers that Firefox accesses on your computer vary and seem to always increase. In one instance, it started at port 1058, then used 1061 then 1068 then 1098 and then 1116, at which point I gave up tracking. 
• The ZoneAlarm Alert Advisor has no useful advice about this (really a ZA gripe)
• When you first install Firefox, your firewall may ask you about access to 127.0.0.1 three different times before you ever see a web site.

July 11, 2004. There is still a problem viewing the Firefox readme.txt file on your computer. In version 0.8 the problem was that the file did not exist, but there was an entry for it in Start -> Programs -> Mozilla Firefox. With version 0.9.1 the situation has reversed. Now there is no entry in Start -> Programs -> Mozilla Firefox for a readme file. However, there is such a file in the Firefox directory (normally C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox)

July 10, 2004. IBM.COM: A page on ibm.com loaded very slowly. The status bar said it was connecting to stats.www.ibm.com. The STOP button was disabled. One part of Firefox thought the page had finished loaded, but another part of Firefox was still trying to load part of it. IBM's web site has been a consistent problem. For more see my Firefox web site gripes.

The HTML rendering problem I described for v0.8 (called Bugs with HRs in Tables in the section on problems displaying web pages) still exists in v0.9. In fact, I found a new wrinkle. You can see one aspect of the problem on my AOL gripes page. Each section heading is supposed to display in the middle of the page with a line on each side of it. Firefox only displays the section heading, not the lines. The lines are HR tags in table cells. The HTML is: 

and it renders as such in your browser:

AOL and Censorship

Increase the size of the left HR from 1 to 2 and you get the effect I described in v0.8. The right HR does not display at all and the text in the center cell is right adjusted to the end of the screen. Increase the size of both HRs from 1 to 2 and it displays just fine (except for the bug with HR colors described just below). 

July 12, 2004. Firefox 0.9.2 continues to, on occasion, consume significant amounts of CPU time when it is not doing anything. At first I only saw this behavior when multiple pages were opened using tabs. Recently I was able to pinpoint one problem page, a review of Firefox from July 9th in PC Magazine: Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1. Opening a new instance of Firefox and going directly to this page, caused Firefox to constantly consume about 33% of the cpu on my machine for minutes on end after the page had loaded. It seems to be a cpu loop, the I/O counts for the process were unchanging. Process Explorer shows it has 8 threads, but all the cpu was in the firefox.exe thread. It was constantly making context switches. 

You still can't sort the bookmarks in a folder by right clicking on the list. When you right click on an HTML file in Windows Explorer, Firefox is still not in the Open With list and also not in the list of available programs that Windows knows about. 

The problem I described regarding the color of Horizontal Ruled Lines (HR tags) remains. To illustrate, the HR immediately below this sentence has no color specified for it. Firefox displays it uncolored, even thought the CSS for this site specifies a color for HRs. For more on this, see my Firefox web site gripes. 

0.8 -> 0.9 Problems That Were Fixed

If you try to X out of Firefox while there are multiple tabs/pages open, the default behavior is now to warn you that you are closing multiple pages. 

You can now right click on an image and copy it to the clipboard. 

FYI: This wasn't really a problem in v0.8, but v0.9 changed the context menu that pops up when you right click on an email link in a web page. Firefox is now sensitive to the fact that it is an email link and offers a new option to "Copy Email Address". 

JavaScript Gripes (version 0.8)

May 2, 2004. I bought something at the CompUSA web site that came with a rebate. The rebate form is provided on the CompUSA site as an Adobe Acrobat PDF document. The link to display the rebate form is done in JavaScript and does not work with Firefox. For more on this, see my Firefox web site gripes.

May 1, 2004. At the Hertz.com web site if you start to make a car reservation and enter the name of the city incorrectly, you are given the option to either find a nearby location or browse all locations. Both of these options are done in JavaScript and neither works in Firefox. Entering an invalid city results in this error message from Hertz: " Pick-up city name or airport/OAG code is invalid. Please try again. Please select location from the right frame". For more on this, see my Firefox web site gripes.

April 29, 2004. I know enough JavaScript to have created a bookmark that displays the cookies for any web page. When I use this on the web site of the New York Times, the entire cookie does not display, it gets chopped off. The book mark is: 
   javascript: alert('Cookie is --> ' + document.cookie + '<--')

April 27, 2004. Firefox JavaScript does not support the command below to close a window. IE6 does.
     <a href="javascript:window.self.close();">Close This Window</a>
Update: May 4, 2004. I have been told by another Firefox user that JavaScript can be used to close a window. I too have noticed on other pages that JavaScript is used to successfully close the browser window. This needs some better documentation and debugging.
Update: May 12, 2004. Another reader pointed out that, for security reasons, JavaScript may not be used to close a window that was not opened by a script. 

A reader of this page pointed out that these JavaScript gripes are not necessarily browser problems but might be problems with the JavaScript code. Either way, however, the Firefox user suffers. Another reader pointed out that Firefox does not use the same JavaScript engine as Mozilla. 
  

Assorted Gripes (version 0.8)

June 15, 2004. Printing. Wanting to print a story on Yahoo News, I first did Print Preview and then opted to print only page 2 of 3. What actually printed was not what the Print Preview function had shown. Then, I went to print the first page and it printed incorrectly, with a page footer covering up a good amount of the text. 

May 6, 2004. CPU Hog. Sometimes Firefox is a cpu hog. Today, I documented it, but I've observed it other times too. I had used Firefox to read two stories on the web site of ComputerWorld magazine. Then I used the computer to do something else. The machine seemed slow. Task Manager showed it was almost constantly over 80% cpu utilization, often over 90%. Firefox was burning the cpu while not being called on to do anything. Task manager also showed it using 58.9 MB of memory, just to view two stories. To prove the problem was Firefox, I saved the URLs of the stories, shut down Firefox, started two instances of IE and used IE to view the web pages in question. After they loaded, IE used no cpu. 
Update. May 18, 2004. It happened again while viewing 4 articles in different tabs at arstechnica.com. 

April 18, 2004. There is no simple easy way to tell what "plug-ins" are installed. By plug-in I am referring to Java, Flash, Shockwave, etc. 

Update: April 21, 2004. A reader of this site suggested using a URL of  about:plugins  This worked (thanks Brian). I'm told it's functionality native to Mozilla. Too bad its not available off the Help menu. One thing it omitted though was Java. However, I don't think any browser natively reports on Java. To deal with this, I set up a web site that tests your browser for the presence of Java and reports on the version and vendor: www.javatester.org. 

April 13, 2004. Tooltips: While viewing a page, if you hover the mouse pointer over an image in IE, you see the alternate text for the image (assuming there is any). Firefox does not do this. 

I watched someone use Firefox today to get email via a web page (Outlook Web Access). There are small icons near the top of the page that do various functions and the person hovered the mouse over the icons but there was no yellow balloon (tooltip) help. The person normally used IE, expected the tooltips and found this annoying because they did not use the application often and depended on the tooltips. For more on this, see my Firefox web site gripes.

April 13, 2004. When you put Firefox in offline mode via File -> Work Offline, there is no indication in the status bar that it is in offline mode. In fact, in normal online mode, there is also no indication of this in the status bar.

April 8, 2004. These gripes are based on using Firefox under Windows 2000 SP4.

When you install Firefox it adds itself to the quick launch bar without asking.

Start -> Programs -> Mozilla Firefox -> Readme file - it does not exist! Specifically, the missing file is "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\readme.txt" 
Update: July 9, 2004. With version 0.9.1 the situation has totally reversed. Now there is no entry in Start -> Programs -> Mozilla Firefox for a readme file. However, there is such a file. 

As you switch between tabs (and thus between web pages) the status bar at the bottom of the screen does not switch. I noticed this with two pages that were very slow in loading. After switching between them, I would still see the page loading message for the page in the other tab. 

I read the New York Times whose web site requires a free registration. When logging in to the web site, there is an option to remember your userid and password. This works great on IE and I can go years without being asked again by the newspaper for my userid and password. It did not work as well with Firefox. The cookies settings in Firefox that I use are enabling cookies for the originating web site and for the current session only. I suspect the current-session-only option may be the problem, so I added the New York Times as an allowed exception to the normal rules. We'll see . . . 
Update. July 11, 2004. This works in version 0.9.1 when allowing only current session cookies, but I set up the New York Times web site as an exception. 

I could not figure out how to tell it what email program to use for mailto: links in web pages. Perhaps this is not configurable? 
Update: May 4, 2004. A reader of this page wrote to say there is add-in called Launchy (for Windows only) that recognizes many common applications and integrates them with Firefox. Thanks Neil. 
Update: June 15, 2004. Another reader wrote to say that you can use IE to set the default email program invoked by all web browsers on your computer. Tools -> Internet Options -> Programs tab. 

The initial toolbar layout leaves a bit to be desired=> However, its fairly easy to modify it...

I chose this=>

Cache: The hard disk cache is specified in KB, it should be in MB. The default cache size is 50,000 KB, I think this is too big. Also, it does not report the name of the folder where cache resides. It is not in the directory where Firefox is installed (which is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox). It beats me where the cache resides. 
Update. May 4, 2004. Two readers of this page wrote to say that in Windows XP the Firefox cache is in
    C:\Documents and Settings\your userid\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\profilename\[random]\Cache 
In Windows 2000, I found the cache in the same location. These readers also noted that while this is true in the initial edition of version 0.8 it will change in version 0.9 and has already changed in later editions (builds) of version 0.8. Specifically, the "Phoenix" directory will be renamed to "Firefox". 

When are pages refreshed from the web vs. displayed from the cache?  It's not clear. I viewed a page on a web site of mine, then shut down Firefox, updated the web page on the Internet, started Firefox again and went to the web page. I got the old version from the cache. 

Firefox offers tabbed browsing, the ability to control multiple web pages from a single instance of the browser. Fine. However in getting used to this new way of working, I sometimes closed the browser and all its sub-windows by mistake. There should be an option to save people like me from themselves. That is, there should be an option that when you close Firefox and there are multiple pages being displayed, it asks "Are you sure?". Mozilla can do this.

Update. May 4, 2004. A reader of this page wrote that Firefox 0.9 will ask for confirmation before closing a window with multiple tabs. In the meantime, try the  Tabbrowser extention. Thanks Neil.
Update. June 15, 2004. This has, indeed, been corrected in version 0.9 which now warns you before closing all open tabs.

Firefox is slow to start up. Mozilla offers a pre-load option, Firefox does not. 
Update: April 20, 2004. I'm told that IE has an advantage here, as large parts of it are resident as part of Explorer, which is always open. I can't confirm this. 

Update: June 3, 2004. Some numbers. On a Windows 2000 SP4 machine (with all patches applied) both Internet Explorer and Firefox are configured to open to a blank page. I started each browser, typed in this URL and then looked at stats for the process using Process Explorer from Sysinternals. I had also noticed that Firefox started up faster the second time in a given day as opposed to the first time. So I closed Firefox, started it again and again typed in the same URL. This time the I/O reads was only 700, pretty much the same as IE.

Firefox  IE Working Set 18,440K 15,476K I/O Reads 5,056 734 I/O Writes 64 3

Then I measured the cost of just starting each browser, again, with both opening to a blank page. The amount of I/O Writes were trivial, so I also looked at cpu usage. Confirmation that Firefox is slower to start up than IE.

Firefox  IE Working Set 15,400K 7,904K I/O Reads 555 94 CPU 1.125 0.250

Firefox could not, at first, sort bookmarks. It turns out though, that there is an "extension" you can download to add this functionality to the browser. The download process is fairly simple, but not explained at all and an IE user would need some explanation. After I downloaded the extension however, it crashed.

When you do Tools-> options the resulting Options window is resizable, but this not obvious from looking at it. You can click and drag the edges of the window to resize it despite the lack of normal visual clues.

Like IE6, Firefox can automatically resize large pictures to fit into a smaller browser window. IE6 tells you it did this with an icon in the bottom right corner of the image when you hover the mouse over it. Firefox tells you it did this by changing the mouse pointer to a plus sign or a minus sign, a better design. There is a bug, however. You have to move the mouse for the pointer to change from plus to minus or vice versa. 

To test what plugins came with Firefox, I went to this plug-in tester page at Wired.com. It reported that there was a Flash player, but there was no Shockwave Director player. However, when testing for the Quick Time player, Firefox crashed. I later re-ran the same test and it played Quick Time fine.

When you display the history in a left hand window pane, pages are not grouped by web site as with IE. It turns out that Firefox can do this, but you have to click on View and then by Date and Site. This should be the default.

Things IE does, that Firefox does not (v0.8)

• Firefox does not let you right click on an image and copy it to the Windows clipboard. This feature was added in version 0.9. 
• Firefox doesn't support colors on the scrollbar controlled by CSS. I'm told this is not part of the CSS standard and was added by Microsoft to IE. 
• Firefox does not support colors for table borders 
• Firefox has no Print Preview Toolbar button and no Size Toolbar button 
• While viewing a page, if you hover the mouse pointer over an image in IE, you see the alternate text for the image (assuming there is any). Firefox does not do this (more detail on this is provided above). 
• Firefox can not invoke my preferred web page editing program, in fact, it can't directly invoke any web page editing program
• Firefox does not appear in the "Open With" list for html files. That is, if you right click on an html file in Windows Explorer and say to "Open With", Firefox is not a choice. Even worse, when you opt to "Chose Program" to open the file with , Firefox is not in list of EXE files in Windows. It does show up in the Control Panel Add/Remove programs (as Mozilla Firefox 0.8) but there is no size and the last used date does not appear to get updated. 
  Update: the Control Panel issue seems to have been fixed by version 0.9x. 

Horizontal Ruled Lines. April 25, 2004. Initially, I noticed that Firefox did not support colors for HR tags (Horizontal Ruled lines). Specifically, I was referring to HTML like this:    <hr size="5" color="red">
I was wrong. The testing I did was on a web site controlled by a Style Sheet and I forgot that the style sheet specified the color of HR tags which was over-riding the color specification in the HR tag. 

However, there is still a Firefox gripe here. When an HR tag with no colors specified appears on a web site where the HR colors are dictated by the CSS, Firefox does not color the lines at all. However, if the HR tag has a color specified, then Firefox does color the lines, but with the color from the CSS, not the color specified in the HR tag. On the one hand, it ignores the CSS, on the other hand it honors it. To illustrate, this web site has its HR colors specified in the Style Sheet. The HR at the top of this topic has no color specified, the one just below this topic is specified as red, which is not the color in the CSS. 

A reader of this page also pointed out that Firefox can display colored HRs using HTML like this, which also works in IE:
    <hr size="5" style="background-color: red;">
Update: July 12, 2004. For more on this see web sites that Firefox does not display correctly

FTP: May 25, 2004. Internet Explorer supports FTP in the following situation while Firefox does not. 

I am the webmaster for a web site that I will call "mikesdomain.org" (not the real name). The web site hosting company allows anonymous FTP access to files on this web site if they are placed in a specific directory. They also allow for an FTP based drop box, a subdirectory of the FTP directory called "incoming" where anyone can upload files without needing a userid or password. This directory is "write only", that is, no one can read the files there or even see a directory listing. 

You can go to this domain using IE with  FTP://mikesdomain.org  Doing so, shows you a list of the files publicly available for download and shows the "incoming" directory. From IE, if you double click on the "incoming" directory, you get a permission error as it is write-only. However, IE lets you right click on the "incoming" directory and paste a file into it. Firefox does not have a Paste option when you right click on the "incoming" directory. 

Problems Displaying Web Pages (v0.8)

Anchor links within a web page are displayed by Firefox the same as normal links (those that go to another web page). In my opinion, it should not do this, but I don't know if this is considered a bug. It is certainly different than IE. For example, the heading above, "Problems Displaying Web Pages" is the target of an internal page link. You can click on text at the top of this page to go directly to this section. However, clicking on this heading does nothing. It is simply the target of the link at the top of this page. The issue is that when you hover the mouse over the words "Displaying Web Pages", the background changes color, indicating it is a link. But it is not a link, only the target of one. 

Update. April 22, 2004. The style sheet is coded as  A:hover {background-color: #ffd0a0;}

A reader of this page said that this applies to all A elements when the mouse hovers over them. I was advised that to only have A element links be styled by the Style Sheet, I should have instead coded   A:link:hover {background-color: #ffd0a0;}
 
The same reader (thanks Brian) pointed out that if the CSS can't be changed, web page authors can work around this behavior in the HTML by not putting any text in the anchor. For example, instead of writing as I did initially: 
   <h2>Problems <a name="DisplayingWebPages">Displaying Web Pages</a> (v0.8)</h2>

had I instead used: 
    <h2>Problems <a name="DisplayingWebPages"></a>Displaying Web Pages (v0.8)</h2>

then things would work as they do in IE. To test this, I modified the previous section title "Things IE does, that Firefox does not (v0.8)" to work this way and, sure enough, nothing gets highlighted when the mouse hovers over it. This can also be done with XHTML as: 
    <h2>Problems <a name="DisplayingWebPages"/>Displaying Web Pages (v0.8)</h2>

Or to be a bit neater, as 
    <h2>Problems Displaying Web Pages (v0.8)<a name="DisplayingWebPages"/></h2>

But that's not all. Still another HTML approach is  
    <h2 id="DisplayingWebPages">Problems Displaying Web Pages (v0.8)</h2>

I'm now using this approach for the "FYI" topic heading below and for the "Problems Displaying Web Pages" heading above. Thanks Andrew. 

FONT tag takes precedence over CSS: When a heading tag such as H3 is controlled by a Style Sheet and within the range of a FONT tag, IE uses the Style Sheet to govern the display of the heading. Firefox uses the FONT tag. 
For example:   <font face=arial>some text <h3>Heading Here</h3> more text</font> 

Bug with HRs in Tables: In an attempt to get a topic heading to appear in the middle of a drawn line, I use HTML like this on one of my web sites: 
  <table width="100%" border="0"> <tr>
   <td width="35" ><hr color="#800000"></td>
   <td nowrap width="8%">Topic Heading</td>
   <td><hr color="#800000"></td></tr></table>

This works fine in both Firefox and IE. However, it results in a Horizontal Ruled Line default thickness. So, I have actually been using this to force the line to be one pixel high:  <hr color="#800000" SIZE="1">

IE displays this fine, Firefox does not. Adding the size parameter to the HR tag causes Firefox to display the first cell as almost the entire line width and the second cell (with the topic heading) all the way on the right. The last cell is never displayed. I tried this also with Mozilla v1.6 from which FF is derived and Mozilla has the same problem. 

It displays this way in IE =>
and displays this way in Firefox=>

Firefox puts text a new line when it should not. Consider this HTML:
    <font face="Verdana" size="2"><li>DEFENSIVE EMAIL _______________________</font>
  <font face="Verdana" size="1"><a href="#Email">Links Below</a></font></li>

It displays this way in IE =>
and displays this way in Firefox=>

The home page of the Personal Computer Radio Show on WBAI (one of my web sites) has a PHP based page counter that I wrote, included via an iFrame. IE displays the output of the page counter centered on the page. Firefox displays the output left justified. I haven't figured out why. 
Update. April 25, 2004. A reader of this page (thanks Andrew) pointed out an HTML coding mistake I had made inside the PHP page counter script. IE forgave the mistake, Firefox did not. Specifically, PHP script generated the following HTML:  
    <div style="color:white; text-align=center; font-size:8pt; font-family:Verdana;">

This mistake was that there should have been a colon after text-align, not an equal sign. 
Perhaps IE forgave this because the HTML to include the page counter script said the iFrame should be center aligned. 
     <iframe align="center" width=100% height="13" frameborder="0" MARGINWIDTH="0" marginheight="0"
    scrolling=no src="http://mydomain.com/x.php">alternate text here</iframe>  

 See also: my main Firefox gripes page

 See also: web sites that Firefox does not display correctly