Firefox Woes

So I've been running IE7 Beta 2 Preview since it was released, and I've not had the troubles that I've had within the last hour of installing FireFox 1.5.0.1, okay so I can't really compare them - I just gotta put the plug in. I'm currently re-writing the CalendarPopup control and got it fully functional in IE7. So, I decided to switch over to FireFox to see how it works. Well, it seems that some bug crept into FireFox that gives random errors like the following: "Error: Error in parsing value for property 'cursor'. Declaration dropped." Huh? Are you kidding me? This is simply a style being applied to a SPAN tag! Browsing the internet isn't turning up much, but I did find a few posts & newsgroup postings with the same error, heck even with other style attributes. Now that's progress - backwards, that is. Disapointing, and hopefully these things get fixed in the next build. Well, the bright side is that the control still functions as expected, you just don't get a pretty "hand" cursor. Oh well, back to it I guess.

Update: Bah, my lack of understanding w3c standards comes to bite me! BTW - new link I've never seen... www.quirksmode.org ... haven't had time to really check it out.

9 Comments

  • This is because "hand" is an invalid value for the cursor property.

    The correct value is "pointer", IE supports "hand" for bug compat with an earlier version of IE, but also supports the correct w3c value of "pointer".

  • Yes - VS2003 is even a bit buggy/misleading, encouraging you to use the non-standard compliant hand, but discouraging pointer. One of the many tiny issues in a still brilliant product.



    I'd be suprised that FF throws an error on it instead of just ignoring it though. Can you put up a test page Matt? I've never seen that error before, even though I've tried the same thing.

  • Blaming Firefox when it's you that's at fault? Poor. FF even told you what the issue was!

  • Look at the W3C specs before saying that FF has a bug ... it often helps.

  • If you are developing for the WWW, you should pretty much live at quirksmode.org

  • I've never seen quirksmode.org, so thanks for the link. Also thanks for the 'pointer' - pun, lame, yes.

  • I agree that it's annoying that the CSS errors are lumped in with the JS errors so it's hard to tell the real problems. Especially since it's easy to write error-free JS because you can test for the features you need, but almost impossible to write error-free CSS that still has the effect you want in IE.



    However, I completely and entirely disagree with your suggestion that Firefox shouldn't show these errors at all. Browsers have historically been *very* lax about allowing bad HTML and CSS (and attempting to interpret it bug-compatibly with Netscape 3 and IE 3) so developers (such as, apparently, yourself) have gotten into the mindset that "if it works, it must be correct". A browser that actually *tells* you when something's incorrect is a *huge* improvement over one that silently ignores errors or tries to correct them, because it'll tell you when you're doing something that's likely to break in other, as yet unknown, browsers (and bear in mind that up until a few weeks ago, IE7 was an "as yet unknown browser")

  • I had a bunch of problems when upgrading to the latest version of Firefox, too. And I got the same comments from unemployed amateur web developers on my blog, too. I'm still never switching back to IE unless I have to, but I'm also dreading Firefox 2.0.

  • Coilin, after 1000 years in development you'd hope that ie7 delivers something. At the moment ie is steaming pile of.... so heavily tied to the OS that if something goes awry you cannot reinstall the damn thing. I recommend to all my clients not to use ie, not to wait for the next ie and just use FF or Opera.

Comments have been disabled for this content.