I’ve never really been a proponent of any browser - every one has it’s fair share of serious problems and all of them influence design (or the lack of it) pretty significantly in one way or another.  MSIE has taken some pretty hard hits since the beginning (and with reason) - from it’s memory leak issues to rendering to security concerns.  What I haven’t seen is a whole lot on Firefox’s pitfalls so in some weird way, it’s kind of refreshing to see someone attack the other biggie in the bunch.

“In 2007, Firefox certainly hasn’t destroyed IE’s market share, but it sure has made a dent. While that’s a positive thing in the name of choice and the triumph of good software, Firefox has quite possibly made a negative impact on the development of web sites and software when viewed in the context of accessibility. Think about it: before Firefox, most websites were not only ‘optimized’ for IE, you pretty much had to view them in IE if you wanted to see anything more than the equivalent of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle blown apart with a shotgun. Even though it could be argued that web design standards have come quite a ways since then (and they certainly have), the damage done from Firefox’s wild popularity among the tech savvy (and even not-so-savvy) primarily lies in this new frontier of web apps and services.” (excerpt from article on DownloadSquad.com - read the complete article here).

For those of you who bother to test on multiple browsers but only have Windows at home, don’t forget to download and install the Windows version of Safari.  I admit, it does make you look at things differently, especially where Ajax and cross-browser CSS issues are concerned.  Apple also has some pretty good docs for those of you tackling development particularly where Safari is concerned.