Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The Mozilla Family (Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape)

Mozilla has always been a popular browser among Linux programmers, and while its latest incarnation, Firefox, was still in alpha, it began causing quite a stir in the CSS world due to advancements made to its layout engine, Gecko . At the time of Firefox 1.0’s launch, Gecko was the layout engine rendering closest to the W3C specs and supported enough CSS 3 to make the hardcore CSS designers salivate. All browsers in the Mozilla family (Camino, Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape) use Gecko.

Tip

Netscape 8 (currently only available for Windows) allows the user to switch between the standard Gecko layout engine and the Trident layout engine from Internet Explorer. Also, America Online (AOL), the former parent of Mozilla, has released its own browser that sits on top of Internet Explorer 6.

Despite its best efforts, the Gecko engine still has a few quirks that need to be worked out (see Table 25-3), but, thankfully, they don’t get in the way all that often. At the time of this writing, the Mozilla Foundation has released a beta of Firefox 1.5, and there have yet to be any new bugs discovered.

Table 25-3. Gecko bugs and fixes at a glance

Bug	Fix
position: relative; is not supported on table elements.	Wrap the table in another block-level element that can be positioned relatively, such as a div.
Any floated element following a heading (h1, h2, etc.) will be overlayed by the first line of text that should flow around it.	No fix available. ...