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Topics Below: By Design ActiveX Problem Sites Problems First Noted with v0.9
Problems First Noted with v0.8 Tooltips Horizontal Ruled Lines Fixed Web Sites FYISee also: the main Firefox gripes page and older Firefox gripes
Have you found another site? Add it as a Reader Comment
Note: The next release of Firefox will have a feature to report web sites that don't work well directly to Mozilla
By design, Firefox does not display web pages exactly the way Internet Explorer does. On the one hand, there are W3C standards and on the other hand, the way IE works. They are different. Firefox and Mozilla and Opera have opted to obey the W3C standards so page rendering differences between all these browsers and IE are to be expected. I run a few web sites and stumbled across some of my own HTML coding sloppiness that IE let slip by but Firefox did not.
While Firefox and Mozilla are to be applauded for conforming to the "standards", the unfortunate net result for the user is that pages display differently, sometimes quite differently, in alternate browsers. Then too, the popularity of Internet Explorer and the laziness of web site designers results in many web sites that are only tested against IE. Should Firefox/Mozilla gain in popularity, perhaps webmasters will also test their sites to see how they render with these browsers.
This page aims to provide a heads up on the expected differences when using Firefox.
Many of the page rendering differences are minor. Take this page for example. If you are viewing this page with Firefox (v0.8 and v0.9), the scroll bar is the last thing on the right side of the browser window. To the left of the scrollbar is the dark gray page border. IE renders this page differently, with the dark gray border the rightmost thing and the scrollbar to the left of the border. No big deal.
Note: The border attributes are specified in the Style Sheet as:
border-color: #313942; border-style: solid; border-left-width: 3em; border-right-width: 3em;
This page illustrates another such difference, the color of the scrollbar. The ability to assign colors to the scrollbar is not part of the CSS standard, but IE supports it and this web site uses it. When you view this site with Firefox, the scrollbar on the right appears with the normal default color. When viewed with IE, the scrollbar should be a bright blue, the same color as the section headings.
The topics below on Tooltips and Horizontal Ruled Lines are also relatively minor page rendering issues.
More importantly are the functional differences between the browsers. For example, Firefox does not support ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects (BHOs). This is part of what makes Firefox safer, there is more on ActiveX below.
In the best case, a functional difference will be immediately apparent the first time you view a web page with Firefox on a new site. Perhaps, for example, the navigation menus won't work. Then too, I ran across a web site where you had to click on a button to start a paid transaction. Clicking the button in Firefox did nothing. No big deal, just switch to IE. In the worst case however, you will be halfway through doing something and find out you can't finish it. This happened to me at the web site of Jet Blue where, while in the middle of purchasing tickets, I found out that Firefox was not able to click on the plane picture to select my seats.
A minor point: Any alternate browser will not support a web site that uses client side VBScript. I don't know of any web site that uses this however, JavaScript seems to have monopolized the market for client side scripting.
More web page rendering differences between IE and Firefox are described below: Tooltips Horizontal Ruled Lines
New Year's resolution for Firefox: Grow December 24, 2004, CNET News.com. Quoting: "To attack the compatibility problem, Mozilla plans to hire new staff to ferret out IE-only sites and advocate standards-based coding methods to their authors... In the coming year, the full-time, paid staffers will double down on the work of convincing Web authors, one by one, to code to standards."
October 6, 2007. Xandros sells a commercial Linux distribution. If you want to buy it, you end up at
this page on their website to find a
reseller. The page didn't work with Firefox 2.0.0.7.
Update: May 25, 2008. It now works fine with Firefox.
July 24, 2007. This problem has been fixed. When someone commented that this works in Opera, I tried it
again. Instead of opening the map in a new window, Fedex now displays the map at the bottom of the current page
- which works fine in Firefox 2.0.0.4.
January 23, 2007. Firefox v2.0.0.1. At www.fedex.com you
can search for their stores near you. If you enter a zip code, you get back a
list of their locations and a thumbnail of a map. Clicking on the thumbnail is
supposed to display a full size map, but this doesn't work in Firefox. I then
configured both fedex.com and www.fedex.com as exceptions to block all popups
rule, but it still didn't work.
July 24, 2007. This problem has been fixed. Mercora works with Firefox v2, but requires installing an
extension. However, I found problems with a video played at mercora.com. The pause button and the Menu button
did nothing.
December 12, 2006. www.mercora.com worked with Firefox
v1.5 but when used with Firefox v2 it does not correctly detect the browser.
Thus it issues an error message that it only works with Firefox 1.5 and above,
which of course, is not true.
CNBC Transcripts and Videos at Burrelles. May 14, 2006. All shows display wrong.
Windows Live Shopping: great site unless you're using Firefox May 2, 2006. Ars Technica.
February 5, 2006. When viewing www.traders.com, Firefox consumes almost all the cpu on my computer even well after the page has finished loading. After the page has loaded in IE, it consumes no cpu.
Want Internet access everywhere? Verizon's EV-DO network is said to be the best. The marketing people call it "Broadband Access". To sign up for it on Verizon's web site, you have to use Internet Explorer (and also have active scripting enabled). December 2, 2005.
If you live on Long Island in New York City, don't go to the web site of the local news
channel. www.news12.com/LI crashes Firefox.
Update: May 25, 2008. This has been fixed.
security.ithub.com from Ziff Davis requires horizontal scrolling in Firefox but not in IE. October 19, 2005.
The home page of www.digitallife.com has layer problems. The drop-down menu for "media, analysts, industry" displays behind a box displaying a Flash ad and thus can not be seen. October 6, 2005.
FEMA Aid Site Blocks Access To Firefox, Macs, Linux Users September 7, 2005. Information Week. Users looking to file claims online for government help must be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later with JavaScript enabled. That blocks everyone running Linux, Apple Macintosh computers, and Windows users running alternate browsers such as Firefox or Opera.
August 31, 2005. Yahoo's LaunchCast Internet Radio does not work with Firefox. The error is: "Sorry, we do not support Netscape on the Windows platform. Error Code: 25 - 0". Netscape?
July 22, 2005. The CNET Anchor Desk page does not display well with Firefox when using large fonts. I made a small screenshot of it.
July 11, 2005. LG makes flat panel monitors, among them the L1920P. Don't try to get the specs on the web page for the monitor, they only display with IE. Also, the radio site live365.com does not work with Firefox.
July 9, 2005. Quoting AOL "Currently AOL Radio does not support Firefox. Please come back next month, when Firefox support will be available."
July 7, 2005. Want to learn how to submit your podcast to Apple for listing in the new version of iTunes? I did. But you can't with Firefox and Windows 2000. The original URL is redirected here and this page never loads, it seems to be in a loop.
July 6, 2005. D-Links web page for their MediaLounge DSM-320 Wireless Media Player does not display correctly with Firefox. Some of the boxes in the right hand column, overlay content in the main part of the page. The page has a comment feature which opens a new window where you can type comments to D-Link. The comments also do not display correctly with Firefox. The Submit button at the bottom was cut off.
June 15, 2005. Computer Associates has a Spyware Encyclopedia that can not be searched using Firefox. Clicking the Search button invokes a JavaScript function that seems to do nothing when run by Firefox.
May 21, 2005. Some pointed this site out in the reader comments for this page. Probably the worst web site I've seen in terms of working correctly with Firefox is the Minnesota Social Services Association. None of the links work with Firefox! In fact, Firefox does not even detect them as links.
May 18, 2005. Yahoo mail only supports Composing Messages with Color and Graphics with IE 5.5 and higher.
May 17, 2005. WFAN is a sports radio station in New York City that offers segments of some shows on their web site. They use Real Player embedded in a web page to play the clips. Most of the time the audio clip was playing, Firefox consumed 98% of my cpu. Playing an audio clip normally requires very little cpu horsepower. There was no separate Real Player process in Task Manager.
May 15, 2005. Postini handles email, filtering out spam and viruses for companies. They have a web page on their site with email stats. It does not display properly with Firefox 1.0.4. Other parts of their web page also do not display properly with Firefox.
May 15, 2005. Interested in reading an old article from Forbes.com. Not with Firefox, you're not. The error page says: "Error: Unsupported Browser. Access to this article may be purchased using current versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer. Your browser does not support the featues of our purchase process".
 May 12, 2005.
Yahoo News, one of my favorite
sites, was recently re-designed and now suffers a bit when viewed with Firefox 1.0.3.
As shown here at the right, the first story is sometimes overlaid with text from
the heading. In this case the words "My Sources" have wrapped out of
the heading. I suspect this is because I set the minimum font size to 13 pixels. |
May 10, 2005. Video of Desperate Housewives on ABCs web site does not play in Firefox 1.0.3
May 9, 2005. At beethoven.com there is a web mail system that does not work well with Firefox v1.0.3. When you double click an email message in IE it opens the message in a new browser window. In Firefox, this new window never opens, even when you tell Firefox to allow the web site to open new windows. I gave permission to www.beethoven.com, mail.beethoven.com and to *.beethoven.com. It still didn't work.
April 30, 2205. The VMWare web site has a menu bar, one entry of which is "News and Events". On my 1024x768 display, this menu item displays on two lines even though there is a lot of screen real estate on the right that is not being used. IE displays this on a single line which no doubt is the intent. I tried to tell VMware twice about this, but they rejected my emails.
April 22, 2205. On the Dell web site, if you enter an expired coupon during checkout, you are notified that the coupon expired with a pop-up window. Firefox blocks this pop-up window, so it appears that nothing happens at all when you enter an expired coupon. I told Dell about it. No response.
April 16, 2005. Webroot makes Spy Sweeper and other software. Their web site requires horizontal scrolling with Firefox, but not with IE. There is also no feedback mechanism on the web site for the web site. I entered a problem ticket and got a quick response: "Our website is currently designed mainly for the IE series of browsers . . ."
April 10, 2005. Powerhouse, which claims to be "The UK's largest independent home appliance retailer" checks whether you are using IE or not. If not, the web site will not work at all. All you see in Firefox is an error message saying you must use IE.
April 8, 2005. The menus at the top of pages on OptimizingPC.com do not display correctly with Firefox 1.0.2.
April 5, 2005. The free spyware removal page from AuditMyPC.com does not display properly with Firefox 1.02. In the left hand column, there is an entry for "Spy Bot" with lots of numbers. In IE these numbers remain in the left hand column, but with Firefox they spill over to the right and overlay the main body of the page.
March 21, 2005. Shutterfly.com does not fully support Firefox.
March 15, 2005. This was first noticed by a reader of this page. The home page of www.mdva.state.mn.us causes Firefox v1.0.1 on Windows 2000 to loop forever, burning cpu. The web page uses Java and I confirmed this problem on a copy of Firefox using Java version 1.4.2_06 from Sun.
March 11, 2005. If you are interested in buying a Fujitsu laptop computer, this web page offers a drag and drop comparison of their different models. It does not work with Firefox.
January 30, 2005. Streamload lets you store files on their servers. Want a demo of the service? You will have to use IE.
January 23, 2005. I wrote some FTP gripes with Firefox in May 2004, back with v0.8. A reader of this page noted today that Firefox "Does not provide user logon for FTP even when My Network Places has the FTP address, logon ID and password saved (IE does)".
January 18, 2005. The GreenPoint Bank's web site does not support Firefox for online banking. The home page works fine, but when you attempt to log in to your account, you get an error: "You are using an unsupported browser." See a screen shot (opens in new window, 95K)
January 7, 2005. Business Week magazine offers videos that do not work with Firefox. On a Windows 2000 SP4 computer, with both Windows Media Player 9 and Real Player 10 installed, it said there was no available video player software.
December 28, 2004. Journey Ed sells software at educational discount. The
pages on their site that display the details of any specific product do not work
well with Firefox at al. For example, the page for Microsoft
Works Suite 2004 requires horizontal scrolling with Firefox but not with IE.
Even worse, the purchase requirements section displays fine in IE but is total
garbage when displayed in Firefox 1.0.
Update: A reader of this page (thanks Bill) pointed out that this
can be traced to non-displayable characters, specifically NUL characters, in the
web pages at Journey Ed. IE ignores the NULs and displays the page as if they
were not there. Firefox displays a standard "unknown character" box for
each NUL character it encounters. These "unknown character" boxes make
sections of the page much wider than they were intended to be, thus resulting in
the need for horizontal scrolling. To me, there is nothing wrong here with
Firefox. This is a case of a bug in IE and a bug in the Journey Ed web site
canceling each other out. January 14, 2005.
December 15, 2004. It's not only web sites that have some "issues" with Firefox, so too did a router. Specifically, the 802.11b Netgear wireless router model MR814 v2 with Firmware Version V5.3_05. Like all routers this one is administered using a web page interface. With Firefox you can not edit any 128 bit WEP keys because of JavaScript pop-up error message about the maximum key length being 26 characters. You can't delete a character from the WEP key or copy the WEP key with Ctl-C.
December 15, 2004. It's no surprise that Microsoft web sites don't work well with Firefox. For example, Knowledge Base article 177078 requires horizontal scrolling in Firefox but not in IE.
December 13, 2004. The Mix97 web site has Java based navigation at the very top of their home page, just to the right of their logo. These applets work with IE but fail to load with Firefox (according to the status line). Thanks Andy for pointing this out.
December 6, 2004. On the home page of Edible
Arrangements there is a store locator. Clicking the Locate button in Firefox
does nothing. In IE a new window opens showing the store locations. Perhaps
Firefox blocked the creation of the new window? The window is created in JavaScript
with the showModal method of the window object.
Update: December 30, 2004. Someone emailed me that Firefox does not
support the JavaScript showModalDialog() function. However, he said that it should be coming fairly soon to Mozilla, and then
Firefox. Thanks Mark.
The ESPN Sports Nation page has a number of things that don't work well with Firefox. There are two scroll boxes on the page and neither can be manually scrolled with Firefox. Also, the polls don't work at all, you can't select a choice or submit your vote.
December 5, 2004. This Lockergnome web page looks fine at 1024x768, but at 800x600 the big ad at the top of the page overlays the main body of the page. This does not happen with IE at 800x600.
December 4, 2004. Domain Direct is
a registrar and like all registrars you can log on to their web site and
administer a domain. Their logoff function does not work with Firefox. It
invokes JavaScript to do a window.close() function which works on some web
sites, but on this site it does nothing. The JavaScript console says "Scripts may not close windows that were not opened by script."
It works under IE. Also, after renewing a domain, the final web page has a
button to click that takes you to your control panel. This button also does not
work with Firefox.
August 28, 2004. Microsoft just re-designed their web site. It doesn't work well with Firefox. No surprise here. Here is someone else's take on it.
August 20, 2004. The web site of Verizon Wireless is less functional with Firefox than with IE. I've seen this in a couple places in different ways. One web page had a useful popup window suppressed by Firefox.
August 16, 2004. The web site of the Washington Post does not work well with Firefox. When I got to a page that required my userid and password, I entered them and got an error message that my email address (which they use as a userid) was not found. The same userid/email worked fine a second later from Internet Explorer.
August 14, 2004. Movielink.com does not work with Firefox at all. Their home page detects that you are not using IE and issues a warning that only IE is supported. This is still true as of May 13, 2006.
August 9, 2004. One of the commuter trains in New York City is called Metro North. If you want to see the train schedule, you would start at this page. Clicking on the calendar in IE pops up a small calendar next to the departure date. In, Firefox the calendar appears too far to the right. There is a Fares button on this page that does nothing when clicked in Firefox but works fine in IE. The site also has no way to communicate with the webmaster, a sure sign of trouble.
August 7, 2004. eBay. This is second hand, and, as I don't use eBay, I can't confirm it. In Browser Switching Reports from the Field it says that someone ended up in a loop on eBay between “Buy It” and the Legal Agreement page and couldn’t proceed with a purchase. eBay said that Mozilla/Netscape wasn’t compatible with its software.
July 26, 2004. Israel National News. A reader pointed out that there are reader comments at the bottom of news stories at www.israelnationalnews.com. The comments display in IE but not in Firefox. Example.
July 25, 2004. Simtel.
A reader pointed out that the Simtel
web site does not render correctly with Firefox.
Update. August 5, 2004. Another reader pointed out that View -> Increase text
size fixes the problem and the page looks fine. If the text is too big, then
View -> Decrease text size will set it back to the default. However, this
needs to be done on every web page.
July 24, 2004. Sygate. The online store where you purchase Sygate software does not render correctly in Firefox 0.92.
July 23, 2004. Skeeter Beater. A reader of this page pointed out that at www.skeeterbeater.biz Firefox users can't see the text. Keep this in mind if you plan on using The Info Group to do a web site for you. I emailed them...
July 22, 2004. A reader of this page complained that sportsnet.ca did not work well with Firefox. Specifically the comment was that it "hangs when loading with Firefox causing all other open tabs or Firefox windows to hang while something callen rnm.ca loads." When I tried it with v0.9.2 under Windows 2000, sportsnet said that I was using an old version of Flash and should upgrade. Macromedia's Flash tester page showed I was using version 6.0.29.0. They are now up to 7.0.19.0. After installing the latest version of Flash for use by Firefox, the web site worked fine for me.
July 20, 2004. Odeon cinema chain in England: As per this article (Changing the Face of Web Surfing) in Wired news today, the Odeon web site does not display in Firefox. The initial splash page is fine, but after clicking on the big image there, the next page is just a background image. Odeon is the largest cinema theatre booking site in the UK.
July 20, 2004. Buying movie tickets from Myway: If you are a www.myway.com
user with a customized list of movie theatres on your my myway page, then you
can buy tickets online at some movie theatres. This function does not work with
Firefox, but does work with IE (thanks Andy for the heads up). A sample link
is
www.movietickets.com/purchase.asp?afid=USBUL&house_id=7414&movie_id=45621&perfd=07702004&perft=11:3
Clicking on a specific movie time, generates server side ASP
errors:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: '[string: "07202004"]'
/purchase.asp, line 188
Update: An anonymous user made a comment on this page on December
7, 2004: "...Myway is obviously doing some kind of browser detection and then putting incorrect data in the
URL ... myway has been contacted and should be fixing their problem...If anyone is having other browser compatibility issues with MovieTickets, please forward these issues
to browsercompatability "at" movietickets.com."
July 13, 2004. Forbes Magazine. The web site of Forbes has a menu horizontal menu bar at the top of each page. Like any menu bar, when the mouse hovers over an item a submenu is displayed underneath. When viewed with Firefox 0.9.1 the submenus never appear.
D-Link Router: As is typical with routers designed for home use, the
D-Link DI-704 has a web based front end and it is administered via a web
browser. For the most part this works with Firefox 0.9x, but a Logout button
does not work. The HTML for the button is
<INPUT TYPE=BUTTON VALUE="Log out" onClick="GURL('/cgi-bin/logo?rc=@&rd=index_');parent.close()">
July 13, 2004. Displaying a font in 8 point size: At the bottom of this page is an orange stripe with the creation date of this page on the left and the last update date on the right. At first this was displayed using either a FONT tag with a Size parameter of 1 or the SMALL tag. Then I decided to upgrade to CSS and created a dedicated Class with a font-size of 8pt (which I thought was equal to the FONT tag Size of 1). IE displayed the text just fine, but with Firefox it was so small as to be unreadable. The CSS now specifies 9pt (9 points) which looks fine in both browsers.
July 11, 2004. (v0.9.2) The web site www.bloglines.com will consume 100% of my processor for a few seconds while loading a long RSS feed. Even just returning focus to the browser after having used another application, again causes the cpu to jump to 100% for a bit.
July 7, 2004. Firefox 0.9.1 under Windows 2000. 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 example, this is their About
Us page. Some of the images appear when I mouse over them, others never
appear. If I right click on the broken image graphic and opt to view the image,
Firefox says it is not found on the server. One of the image files is
"/images\lsidebar_03.gif". I can only
assume that the backslash is not understood by Firefox.
Update: July 8, 2004. A reader wrote to say that on an Apple Macintosh 10.3.4, the above problem exists
with many web browsers, including Firefox 0.9.1, Safari 1.2.2, a recent copy of Mozilla
and even Internet Explorer 5.2.3! I don't have access to a Macintosh so I can't
verify this.
Update: July 9, 2004. Another user (thanks Bill) verified this. Turns out
its an old IE vs. the world issue. A backslash is a valid character that can be used in URLs.
It is not meant to delineate the barrier between directories (folders). You can
read more about this at SharkySoft.
Update: July 15, 2004. Off the topic, but the site designers for NY
Waterways are not even able to link back their own home page. On the credits
page, the link to JesseJames
creative is both broken and malformed. You can't make this stuff up.
They also cause the script warning shown on the right. This however, may be a plus for Firefox as IE also slows down displaying the pages on this site but does not warn you about it. |
 |
July 10, 2004. (v0.9.2) IBM.COM: For whatever reason, IBM's
web site loads much slower with Firefox than with IE. Much slower.
One time while a page was loading the status bar said it
was connecting to stats.www.ibm.com.
Update. July 15, 2004. The IBM home page
still loads much slower in Firefox 0.9.1 on my computer, as opposed to IE. With
IE it loads in a couple seconds, with Firefox I stopped counting after 30
seconds.
Update. July 23, 2004. IBM's site continues to load slower with Firefox when
compared to IE on the same computer. Today I tested this on a different machine,
so now I've seen it both in Windows 2000 and XP. To make sure that IE was not
getting the benefit of ISP caching, I used Firefox second when testing. The IBM
home page took about 4 seconds to load with IE, over 30 with Firefox 0.91. Same
thing when clicking on the Developers
link on the home page. Firefox hangs with the status bar indicating it is connecting to stats.www.ibm.com.
In a couple cases it took over 60 seconds to display a page and that's sitting
behind a cable modem and having IE load the pages much much faster on the same
machine.
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. JavaScript is enabled in the browser
and all the advanced JavaScript options are on. The link is:
javascript:openrebate('http://image.compusa.com/pdfs/0008903.pdf')
The underlying function definition in the web page is:
function openrebate(url_str) { var reb_win;
reb_win = window.open(url_str, "reb_win",
"scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=300,resizable=yes"); }
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".
The JavaScript command to browse all the Hertz locations is:
javascript:changeRightLayer('/servlet/BrowseLocationServlet?type=pickupLocation')
The underlying function definition in the web page frame is:
function changeRightLayer(url) {document.layers['right'].src= url; }
My guess here is that both Hertz and Firefox share some blame. Hertz is probably trying to detect the browser and use appropriate JavaScript. However, Firefox does not do a good job of self-identifying, so the Hertz site probably thought it was dealing with a Netscape v4 browser. Specifically, Firefox returns "Netscape" to a JavaScript program that examines the navigator.appName variable. Then again, the string it provides for navigator.appVersion starts with "5.0".
FYI: A reader (thanks Luis) pointed out
the correct way to do browser detection (for customizing JavaScript to the
browser) is to check for features rather than for a browser. For example, to do
stuff with layers in JavaScript, use:
if(document.layers){
do things with 'layers' }
To test for standards compliant browsers, use:
if(document.getElementById)
{ do things that work in IE, Mozilla or any browser supporting getElementById
}
To use the document.all object, check if it is supported
rather than checking for IE, the only browser that does support it:
if(document.all){
do things with the document.all object}
May 11, 2004. Jet Blue. I purchased plane tickets on the web site of Jet Blue Airlines. After buying the tickets, the web site lets you choose your seats. This function did not work in Firefox, but does work in IE. This one really hurt as I was booking seats for my first trip on Jet Blue.
A reader pointed out this is likely a bug in IE. Quoting Scott: "It appears that the overlapping text is caused by floating that text incorrectly to the left of the logo image. The W3C standards specify that floated elements should not interfere with the vertical flow of content. A float should shove the line-boxes over for regular content, having the effect of moving the regular content down, but otherwise should not affect the vertical placement of elements. The problem is that IE has a float bug whereby it will stretch the containers of floats to fit the float even if there is not enough regular (i.e. non-floated) content to hold it open. Firefox, correctly, does not do this; unfortunately, this lends the appearance that Firefox has a bug, when in reality it is IE and the web page's code that have complementary bugs". In addition, Mr. Notenboom has a paid service that accepts Paypal. It worked on my PC with IE6, but did not work with Firefox v0.8 or with v0.9, where clicking on the Paypal button does nothing. I also tested this with Mozilla 1.6 and it too had the same problem. Perhaps this is related to the fact that Firefox identifies itself as Netscape. Fixed: The site displays Google ads in a right hand column. This works
fine in IE6, but in Firefox 0.8, the ads were chopped off on a 1024x768 screen and
required horizontal scrolling to fully display. By Firefox 0.9 this has
been fixed. |
Web sites that depend on ActiveX will not work with Firefox. There are two sides to this coin. The lack of ActiveX support is part of what makes Firefox safer than Internet Explorer. On the other hand, it means you must use IE for some very useful web sites. Among the most useful sites that require ActiveX are
Housecall is a free online virus scanner from Trend Micro. A Java based version of Housecall is under development (thanks Mike).
PC Pitstop is a very useful web site that depends on ActiveX. Dedicated Firefox (and Mozilla and Opera) users can still use the site however, with the help of the Neptune plug-in (from Meadco) that can run ActiveX controls from non-IE browsers. Read their explanation. (thanks again Mike)
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 noticed this while watching someone use Firefox to get email via a web page (Outlook Web Access). The web site had 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.
This is a case of Firefox obeying the rules, but unfortunately, this leaves it less functional than IE. Firefox (and Mozilla) follow the W3C recommendation that the ALT attribute of an IMG tag only be used when the image cannot be displayed. The TITLE attribute is intended for presenting information that goes with the image (like a caption). IE does not follow these rules, instead it uses the ALT attribute to display the tooltip (overridden by the TITLE attribute, if present, in later versions of IE). Firefox does indeed, display the TITLE attribute as the tooltip.
| ALT and TITLE tags | ALT tag only | |
You can test your web browser using the Firefox logos on the right. The one on the left has both an ALT attribute and a TITLE attribute. Hover your mouse pointer over the logo to see what your browser displays. Each attribute self-identifies itself. Both IE and Firefox will display the TITLE attribute. Fine. The logo on the right however, has only an ALT attribute. IE will display it when the mouse hovers over the image, Firefox will not. |
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April 22, 2004. A reader of this page was nice enough to point out that there is an extension for both Firefox and Mozilla at extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/popupalt that is supposed to show ALT tag text as a tooltip. I haven't tried it. For more on why allowing ALT text to be a tooltip is considered a bad idea see the Mozilla Web Author FAQ. Thanks, Travis.
July 18, 2004. The Sun Cobalt RaQ 550 has an administrative interface that uses a web browser. Parts of this interface use icons to indicate the available functions. In IE, hovering the mouse over the icon produces a tooltip as to what function it represents. In Firefox, hovering over an icon causes the page to refresh (or so it seems) and no tooltip.
You may not see the correct colors for horizontally ruled lines (HR tags) when viewing web sites with Firefox (this was last tested with v0.9.2). If the web site has a Style Sheet that specifies the color for horizontal lines, IE always honors that color. The way Firefox deals with this is however, is all over the map. How do I know? This web site uses a Style Sheet to force orange lines. Specifically, the CSS file for computergripes.com specifies: HR{ COLOR: #FF9C39;}.
The table below illustrates this in detail. An HR tag with no color specified is not colored at all by Firefox - ignoring the Style Sheet. An HR tag with a Color parameter specified, causes Firefox to render the line with the color from the Style Sheet. Inline styles can also be used to color a horizontal line. The third example below shows an in-line style specifying green. In this case, Firefox ignores both the Style Sheet and the inline style and renders the line without any color at all. I wanted to make this example easier to read, so I played with the Size attribute of a line to make them thicker. Turns out this also effects the Firefox coloring. The last line shows that when the size is specified, Firefox renders the line with the color from the inline Style. What a mess.
|
Underlying HTML | Live Output | IE | Firefox |
| <hr> | orange | no color | |
| <hr color="green" > | orange | orange | |
| <hr style="background-color: green;"> | orange | no color | |
| <hr style="background-color:green;" size="5"> | orange | green |
To insure that Firefox users see orange lines on this site, I fudged all the
HR tags to include a Color attribute as per the second example above. :-(
Updated: July 12, 2004
Update. July 15, 2004. A reader of this site (thanks Alex) suggests that possibly the reason that changing the size changes the color, is that by default Firefox is showing only a border for the line and not a background. Thus changing the background color does nothing. He has found that Firefox reacts very differently to border attributes than IE and suggests web developers specify the different (top, left, right, bottom) border colors, widths, padding etc. explicitly. Trying to set the whole thing, rather than each individual side, all but insures different rendering in the different browsers.
Update. July 19, 2004. A reader of this site (thanks Martin) suggested modifying the style sheet to specify hr {border: width style color}. For example, I could use hr {border: 1px solid #FF9C39;}. The problem with this is that when applied to a wide line (for example HR size="7") you get a border in the desired color, but the middle of the line is not colored at all.
Update. December 11, 2004. A reader of this page said that if the color is specified separately by itself and then again, and both are put into the
style sheet like as shown here, it will show up in Firefox and IE. I haven't
tested this.
hr {color: orange}
hr {border-width: 7px; border-style: solid; border-color: orange}
These web sites used to be problematical, but now display correctly with Firefox.
December 16, 2004. In New York City, WCBS (880 on the AM dial) just started streaming
the news over the Internet. Firefox can not find a plug in to play the audio
stream. A very similar error happened with the web site of Sirius
Satellite Radio where you can sign up for a free three day trial.
Update: A reader of this page said that the WCBS streaming works for him.
I suspect it didn't work for me because it uses Windows Media Player and the
computer in question had version 6.4 installed, which is very old. Needless to
say, the WCBS web site says nothing about the supported versions of Windows
Media Player. December 24, 2004.
Update: The radio station said via email that "Firefox is still a work in progress".
December 27, 2004.
Update: When the computer where this failed at first was upgraded from
Windows Media Player 6.4 to 9, the streaming worked.
Update: Streaming does not work again. The underlying technology seems to
have changed. Radiomat does the streaming now and it requires an ActiveX
control. March 18, 2005.
Update: May 14, 2005. I heard a commercial on the radio station bragging
that the audio stream now works with Firefox and Mozilla and also works on
Macs.
November 26, 2004. Family Fun magazine rates the best toys every year. One of
them this year was Shrek 2 Twisted Fairy Tale Game.
There is a link on the page for this toy that opens up a page at Amazon.com
where you can buy it. However, this only works in IE, not in Firefox. I was able
to get around this by modifying the Firefox rules for popups with Tools ->
Options -> Web Features -> Allowed sites button for blocking popups.
Adding familyrun.go.com to the list of web sites that can spawn popup windows
fixed the problem.
Update: This has been fixed. Someone claiming to be from the company emailed me
this: "Just wanted to let you know that a few months ago we fixed the Firefox problem when linking to sites outside our
own ... corporate policy states that we must notify guests when they are leaving our site, hence the pop-up. This “warning popup” now also has a link to the site (in the pop-up) so users can click that to spawn a new window when Firefox (or other pop-up blockers) disable popup windows."
February 2, 2005.
September 9, 2004. The web site hosting company trkhosting.com has a FAQ
on their web site. Clicking on a question in Firefox does not take you to the
question. The HTML used is
<a href="#36">What if the server my website is on gets hacked or attacked? </a>
<a name="#36"></a>
The problem is the anchor tag, it should not have a number sign. IE
tolerates this mistake, Firefox does not. When contacted, the company fixed
this.
August 17, 2004. The Dell.com home page has a search function in the top right corner. Clicking on the word "Search" does nothing at all in Firefox 0.92. The URL that it invokes is javascript:search.submit(); As of November 11, 2004 with Firefox 1.0 PR, this now works.
July 9, 2004. (v0.9.2) 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, despite the fact that there is lots of underlying HTML available from View -> Page Source. Included in the underlying, non-displayed HTML is this warning from Microsoft "You have tried to visit Windows Update with a browser that does not support Frames or ActiveX technology." Makes sense. But a Firefox user will never see it.
Update. July 12, 2004. A reader (thanks Glenn) took a more detailed look at the underlying HTML. The warning I cited appears within a NOFRAMES tag which Firefox would not display because it does support FRAMES. Any web page with a NOFRAMES tag should have a FRAMESET or FRAME tag for the rest of the web page. Windows Update does not, a coding mistake. Also, text that could have otherwise shown up by being outside the NOFRAMES tag is inside a NOSCRIPT tag which displays only if the browser does not support JavaScript or has JavaScript disabled. Firefox does support JavaScript. When Windows Update is opened with Opera, you also get a blank page. Any browser that supports frames and JavaScript is likely to display a totally blank page. I disabled JavaScript in Firefox (Tools -> Options -> Web Features -> Enable JavaScript), went to Windows Update and no more blank page. Instead, a full page of text about making ActiveX work in IE.
You have to wonder if Microsoft made these coding mistakes on purpose. It would be simple to detect IE and provide a specific web page for all non-IE browsers. A non-techie using any full featured web browser who goes to Windows Update gets a blank page. Looks to them like the web browser is broken. Maybe they opt then to stick with IE. Just a (paranoid?) thought.
Update. August 15, 2004. After this topic got a bit of publicity, Microsoft fixed it. When Firefox 0.93 now goes to Windows Update you correctly see a message that it only works with Internet Explorer.
July 29, 2004. The New York Times. This page on Op-Ed Columnists in the New York Times did not display correctly with Firefox. There was no text in the main section of the page which lists the recent columns. I reported it to the paper and it was fixed by the next day. Most likely a coincidence.
July 10, 2004. (V0.9.2). Windows Secrets web site: The search results at WindowsSecrets.com/WinFind
did not display with Firefox 0.9.2. They did display with IE. The top and bottom
of the search results page displayed, but the actual search results in the
middle of the page did not. A View
-> Page Source showed that the results were there.
Update. July 12, 2004. A reader (thanks Glenn) took a more detailed look at
the HTML behind this site and found there were assorted coding errors: multiple
BODY tags, nested tables without declaration of TR/TD tags, mal-formed FORM tags and more.
Too often, the web site is at fault, but the user suffers because the
HTML coding errors are tolerated by IE but not by Firefox.
Update. July 13, 2004. It's fixed! The search is of multiple independent web
sites and was using a commercial search engine in an un-orthodox way that
required some tweaking. Of all the web sites I contacted regarding Firefox
"issues", Windows Secrets
was the most responsive.
April 2004. When the Verizon Wireless home page was viewed with Firefox, some of the navigation buttons were hidden by a big ad. By June 22, 2004 the page displayed correctly in Firefox v0.8 and 0.9.
The home page of www.dealofday.com did not display correctly in Firefox. By June 22, 2004 the site displays correctly with both Firefox 0.8 and 0.9.
Websites alienate Firefox users BBC News. June 23, 2005. Quoting: "One in 10 UK websites fail to work properly on the open source Firefox web browser, a study shows."
In Mozilla Is Gaining on Godzilla by Steve Hamm (Business Week magazine, January 12, 2005) it says that 15% of web sites aren't completely compatible with non-Microsoft browsers. This figure comes from WebSideStory.
Other people are griping too about web sites that only work with IE. No IE? No Can See By Ed Foster August 24th, 2004
Note: In Can Your Site Survive Firefox? By Brian Livingston in Datamation July 19, 2004, I am described as " one of Firefox's harshest critics". This is not true, I like Firefox, I use it often and think everyone should. Mr. Livingston also said that I "reserve the lowest circle of Hell for corporate sites that don't work when viewed with Firefox." Nothing about this web site is angry. The site is more from the perspective of a QA person, not from someone ranting or venting.
Turnabout is fair play. A number of pages on the Mozilla.org web site do not render correctly in IE. Not even close. For example, see the Firefox themes page (thanks Bob). A reader of this page pointed out that, like Windows Update, this page is of no interest to anyone using another web browser. True, but still, they could easily detect the browser being used and deal with this better.
For pages that render poorly in Firefox, there is an extension available to open the page in IE. It is called IE View by Paul Roub and is available at texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#ieview or ieview.mozdev.org
Is turnabout fair play? This Mozilla.org web page does not render well in IE update.mozilla.org/extensions/
Mozilla Site Evangelism from Mozilla.org. Lots of rules, too much work, no list of sites that don't work with Firefox.
See also: Reader Comments (blog) - other web sites that don't work correctly with Firefox
See also: my main Firefox gripes pageSee also: Gripes with Firefox version 0.8
| Page created: July 11, 2004 | Page last updated: May 26, 2008 |
| Prior updates: October 6, 2007 | July 24, 2007 | January 24, 2007 | December 12, 2006 | |
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