———— begin geekspeak ————-
So this morning I’m trying to run my code on Oracle’s 9iAS. I usually test on two browsers – Firefox and IE. Wonder of wonders, my page is displayed quite well on IE, but the CSS is lost in Firefox. I click the nifty javascript console in FF to see what’s happening. The message, is as useful as can be – ‘The stylesheet was not defined as mime type text/css , thus has not been loaded.’

This leads me on a wild chase through the internet trying to figure out how to enable text/css on 9iAS. After 4 hours of fiddling around with the .conf files, I give up. 9iAS, being the behemoth sphinx it is, refuses to yield its secrets to me.

Bored and with nothing else to do, I decide to install FireFox 1.0PR. After 4 minutes of installing, I start up the new FF.

Lo and behold, my page works! The culprits in this case were the transitional XHTML definitions in my DOCTYPE definitions. While FF 0.8 didn’t render CSS in transitional or strict XHTML, FF1.0PR does! Bravo to the mozdev community!
————– end geekspeak ——————-

If you didn’t understand a single word of that rave above, here’s a summary — GET FIREFOX. The spreadfirefox community has as its goal, 1 million downloads of FF1.0PR in 10 days.

Question: Why is FF > IE ?
Answers:
* Tabbed windows – no more 25 open IE windows in your taskbar
* Inline text searching / link searching – just type the words and the links are highlighted – forget the mouse
* Complete standards adherence – CSS, HTML – see geekspeak above
* Excellent pop-up blocking – I’ve only got two pop-ups in a whole year, and they’ve only started appearing of late
* Extensions for just about everything – adding links to text (bloggers take note), ad-blocking, mouse gestures, the list goes on
* It’s free!

Go ahead, give it a try. It’s not panacea – but it’s an alternative to the 80% stranglehold that IE holds over the browser market.