Anatomy of a Firefox bug

I've had an implicit understanding for a while of just how complex coding a browser/parser must be, browsers seem simple and people moan that rendering is not always perfect (recent thread by someone about css implementation) if only they had a feel for how difficult it is, they might not moan so much? Perhaps they should be directed to this as an example of what can be involved?

I've moaned considerably about a couple of FF bugs... I'm no programmer so all I can do is deal with the smelling end, but I have read mailing lists with some Mozilla guys, esp about the legend issue... and basically there were guys saying that being able to move the legend wasn't really in the spec and it's really hard to change etc. I can believe it's hard to change. Only thing is, when it's that hard to change, everyone can just stop with the "FF is better and reacts more quickly because it's Open Source and has a bazillion pairs of eyes on it!" when the small, closed-source Opera dudes seem to be able to fix lots of issues rather quickly (maybe why Opera differs so much from build to build?).

Opera is an very much underestimated browser which I have been saying for some time, it appears to be quite avant guard blazing a trail where others follow on after; sadly due to a few buggy episodes in version releases we tended to mock it and decry it's efforts, I think it's rapidly becoming quite stable and usable.

Has no one noticed 'Dragonfly' ? remarkably similar to Firebug an obvious coincidence though, it works just as well with a one improvement, css cascade shows browser default styles for given element firebug doesn't, and lacks sadly the padding/margin view on elements when hovering Dom nodes, regardless Opera comes of age as a developers browser.

I have to agree about Opera. I remember I wasn't very impressed with it a while back, but I find I like it and use it a fair amount as of late.

There are updates for Opera out all the time. They really try to fix the bugs and issues.

I also like the different views, like author view and user view.

I looked at it a while back but didn't get it much of a run as it didn't have live updates (and wasn't dockable). Live updating has been added to Alpha 3 which has just been released I think.

I've been using Opera as my mail client for about 4 years now but it was only when I realised that it also had a built-in feed reader that I really started using it a lot. It's obviously leading the way in features because a lot of its functionality has now added to Firefox via extensions.