» posted on 10:44pm - August 19 2008 | posted by Lev

Simply put: Firefox 3's rendering engine sucks.

While Firefox 3 has one or two really cool features, and while it claims to be more reliable and perform better, the bottom line is that it has introduced a countless number of new problems.

I seem to notice a new, major issue every other day, and as I continue to upgrade regularly through my package manager, they continue to get worse and worse.

If you are using Firefox 3 you may notice the numerous issues with CSS, which result in awkward colors and alignment issues. You may even notice several other bugs in Firefox 3 concerning table widths, and the use of 100% dimensions failing to scale to the desired size. Another huge annoyance is the inability to remove a browsed file from the input area of an upload field in a form. There are several others I've mentioned over the past month or so in my blog, if you want more information. These issues only exist in Firefox 3, and will not be a problem in Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, or Opera (for the most part).

If you know what's good for you, I'd strongly recommend sticking with Firefox 2 for at least another year, or until you hear me preaching about how great it has become. If it weren't for the fact that my damn package manager won't let me install Firefox 2, I'd remove every trace of it with a big grin of relief.

Obviously, since I wouldn't recommend Firefox 3 to anyone, I have pulled all of the advertisements for Firefox from TT. They will not go up again until the Firefox development team fixes some of these major design and rendering issues which are degrading web sites.

If you think I am babbling on from my own spite to how it displays my pages, you are wrong. Many of the rendering issues I've been noticing with Firefox 3 effect a wide range of web sites, and the issues, while perhaps minor, are prevalent almost anywhere you look.

So as a web designer myself who has a keen eye for these things, I'd have to tell you that Firefox 3 is a big disappointment so far. While I've never been completely satisfied with a Firefox release to date, I would at least stand by version 2 more so than any other browser.

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