My Life and Code

Here's another example of behavioral differences between IE and Firefox. I ran into this one about a month ago and then again this morning. I currently have some webpages where I'm dynamically displaying and hiding controls. This is done via JavaScript/DOM by setting the style.display property of the control I wish to hide or display. To hide a control, setting this property to none does the trick, but to display it, there's a way that works only in IE, and a way that works for both IE and Firefox -- which would be the correct way of doing it. In IE, setting the style.display property to block will re-display the control after it has been hidden, and will display it correctly. But in Firefox, doing this will display the control again but in a different way -- for example, the height of the control as it was before it was hidden is no longer maintained. The correct way of doing this is to set the style.display property to an empty string. Apparently, this is the ...

Even though I've been using Firefox a lot more than IE lately (especially with the speediness of Firefox 3.5), I finally made Firefox my default browser today to assist in doing more proper (i.e. standards-friendly) web development. Firefox is stricter when it comes to standards, whereas IE is more like the parent that lets you stay up past your bedtime or eat junk food after brushing your teeth -- it's lenient and more flexible -- but this isn't a good thing. Anyway, my decision to make Firefox the default browser was justified today when I encountered an issue with z-indexes: certain elements were appearing underneath others, and even though I set the z-index of these elements, there was no change. Then I realized that it worked in IE -- because IE is lenient. According to the CSS spec, z-index only applies to positioned elements (i.e. those whose position property has a value other than static). IE was lenient with this, but Firefox was not -- it was requiring the positi...