This is really funny behaviour I’m seeing with Firefox on Vista… it doesn’t show me the correct background colors in web pages. The pictures on the right show how my blog page is supposed to look (I hope most of you see it that way, with the orange background) and how it looks in Firefox. I should add that of course Firefox works just fine on XP, only not on Vista, and that this problem is not specific to my blog page — I see the same effect in many other pages. The only browser I have found that shows my blog correctly on Vista is Opera… Internet Explorer stopped working for me after only a half day in Vista, but when it still worked it showed a similar effect to Firefox.
Obviously the fact that IE and Firefox show the same problem is really extremely curious, but as I can’t check things with IE at the moment, I decided to do some research on Firefox at least. Looking at the stylesheet settings in effect for my page (using the Firefox DOM inspector), I saw that in addition to the two “normal” stylesheets (one referenced by my page, the other a standard thing in Firefox, both shown on an XP system as well) there’s a third one referenced at the URL about:PreferenceStyleSheet. For some reason this is not in the list on the XP system, only on Vista. This stylesheet sets the background-color to transparent and the setting is marked !important, so I guess this is the source of my problem.
A search on the web and in the Mozilla source control shows that this is a stylesheet used to enforce the default preferences set in Firefox, like the option to use your own background color instead of the document provided one. But there’s no explanation I could find why this would only be done on Vista, or why this should be something that reflects an IE setting on Vista — of course, on my system (and also by default) document settings for backgrounds are allowed anyway, so either way the setting for the background-color shouldn’t be in there. For the moment I don’t have time to look into this further — if somebody can provide some insight, please do so!