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Due to Mozilla Firefox's quick rise in popularity, it has become the subject of much praise and criticism. Somewhere in the midst of it all, some misconceptions have popped up here and there. This article will address some false claims and hot topics found in the public and media regarding the Firefox web browser.

Some claims below are partially true, partially false. In these cases, this article will attempt to put the situation into better perspective.

This page does not mean to give the illusion that all hype or criticism about Firefox is false. Depending on the individual, there may be very good reasons to use Firefox or there may be very good reasons to use something else, and not all reasons either way are touched upon in this article.

See also: Internet Explorer myths and Opera myths.

Features

Firefox is fully standards compliant Up Claim sources: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 No web browser is 100% standards compliant. The web technology standards are very extensive and it often takes many years to implement all of the features of a standard, plus additional time to fix the bugs. In addition, the standards are always evolving and becoming more and more robust. Firefox — along with Opera, Safari, and Konqueror — is certainly a leader in the field of standards support and is quickly adopting new emerging technologies, but it, like the others, does not yet have complete support for the current CSS, DOM, or even HTML standards. Below is a brief summary of how well Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera support some of the most significant standards and emerging technologies. A “Y” indicates perfect support, while a “100%” is the result of rounding. More information is available in the Web browser standards support resource. Although CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 are not technically web standards yet because they haven't reached the Recommendation status, the detailed sections have at some point reached Candidate Recommendation status, which is the stage during which web browsers are supposed to begin implementing support. No browser has full support for CSS 2 either, and several sections of CSS 2 have been removed in CSS 2.1 for this reason. Standards support Technology IE 6 IE 7 Firefox 2 Firefox 3 Opera 9 HTML / XHTML 73% 73% 90% 90% 85% CSS 2.1 51% 57% 92% 93% 94% CSS 3 changes 10% 13% 24% 27% 19% DOM 50% 51% 79% ? 84% ECMAScript 99% 99% Y Y Y

Firefox often displays webpages incorrectly Up Claim sources: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 People usually make this claim when they see a webpage that looks different in Firefox than it does in Internet Explorer, and they assume that Internet Explorer is the one displaying it “correctly” because it looks how the author intended it. Webpage layouts are designed by specifying sets of rules for how things should appear. The rules are primarily written in a language called CSS , which is defined and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. It is up to the individual browsers to implement these sets of rules and handle them how they are defined. Internet Explorer is far behind the competition in implementing this support, as you can see in this standards support summary. Many CSS features are not implemented, and many are implemented incorrectly. Since Internet Explorer usage has been so high for so long, web developers have had to make sure that their pages work as intended in Internet Explorer, or else risk losing a majority of their potential visitors. For some time, many web developers even felt safe developing only for Internet Explorer, paying no attention to the other browsers. Therefore, if they ran into an Internet Explorer display bug, they would simply adjust their CSS to compensate. This compensation, if not done correctly, could actually cause display problems in browsers that don't have that particular bug. It would also cause display problems in future versions of Internet Explorer that have the bug fixed. In the vast majority of webpages that don't work as intended in Firefox, the problem is due to relying on an Internet Explorer bug, relying on non-standard Internet Explorer features that could easily be replaced with standardized cross-browser alternatives, or relying specifically on Internet Explorer's ActiveX technology, which other browsers deliberately do not support by default due to an extensive history of security problems with ActiveX, and which will no longer be enabled by default in future versions of Internet Explorer for this reason. As explained above, no browser has perfect standards compliance, and there are a few parts of some web standards that Internet Explorer supports and Firefox does not, so it is theoretically possible for a standards-compliant webpage to be rendered more correctly in Internet Explorer than Firefox, but this is extremely rare in practice.

Microsoft sets the standards (or should) Up Claim sources: 1 , 2 Some people believe that, due to Internet Explorer's current domination in the market, Microsoft should be the one who defines the standards and other browsers like Firefox should follow Microsoft rather than the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ). This claim is often presented as if Microsoft and the W3C each think that its respective sets of rules are correct and the other's are wrong, which isn't the case. Microsoft is a member of the W3C and has played a role in the development of their standards. The Internet Explorer development team admittedly strives to support W3C standards, but has simply fallen far behind due to the five-year development halt and some lack of direction beforehand. Internet Explorer Group Program Manager Chris Wilson stated in an official blog post, “I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended).”. They have lately been working closely with the Web Standards Project ( WaSP ) to direct Internet Explorer development to support the most demanded web standards in upcoming versions. Many of the rendering aspects of Internet Explorer that some claim to be Microsoft standards are actually bugs and incomplete implementations of W3C standards, and many of these oddities are being fixed in future versions. This means that websites that rely on Internet Explorer's current behavior may fall apart in future versions just as they do today in more standards-compliant web browsers. This is a fact of which Microsoft has warned web developers, and before Internet Explorer 7 was released, they called for web developers to fix their pages for the new version.

Firefox was the first browser with tabs Up Claim sources: 1 , 2 This isn't very widely believed, but every now and then someone expresses this assumption. The first known web browser with tab support was InternetWorks, back in 1994. Opera made a public release with a tabbed MDI in 1996. NetCaptor offered tab support in 1997, followed by IBrowse in 1999, and finally Mozilla offered it natively in 2001. Firefox has supported tabbed browsing since its first release in 2002. Firefox was the first web browser to really make mainstream awareness of browser tabs, but it didn't invent the idea. See the Wikipedia article on Tabbed Document Interfaces for more information.