WildBreeder wrote:So what you are saying is that Opera actually makes an effort to work with the web as it exists today, while Mozilla developers live in some dream world and think only W3C exists? Maybe this is why Mozilla/Firebird has problems with so many pages? I sure hope this isn't the case, but you seem to be convinced of this...
No, Mozilla doesn't live in a "dream world." Mozilla has quirks mode in which it renders pages that do not have a !DOCTYPE or that use HTML 4.01 transitional according to how browsers of the past rendered them. Mozilla supports non-standard tags such as <blink> and <marquee>. Mozilla understands HTML with severe structural errors.
But what Mozilla does not do is attempt to render pages that have blatantly been designed for and tested with only Internet Explorer. Mozilla does not support document.all, which is Internet Explorer's proprietary Document Object Model, as IE and Opera do. Mozilla correctly uses the MIME type of documents, and neither the extension nor the content of documents that it downloads, as IE does and Opera does by default. And Mozilla steadfastly refuses to implement eye-candy like colored scrollbars like IE and Opera do.
Mozilla does a good job of recognizing enough non-standard HTML so that nearly all of the web is usable in Mozilla, but also does a good job of sticking to the standards so that web developers must largely refrain from using the proprietary browser extensions of the past. It's a fine line to tread, and there will always be people who will claim it should walk a slightly different line, but you can never please everyone.