Thanks for the link, SecretMethod70, i'm reading it now. Its good to know someone has exactly the same perception of the situation as i have.
May i add that it also bugs me when large, popular, well established and respected websites only do their testing on IE. I know its the "industry standard" but still...
For example, i was changing some information in my profile on friendsreunited.co.uk using firefox and the form wasnt processed properly (if i remember correctly, a simple apostrophe made the processing script think that the piece of text i entered had finished so it was cut short) so i looked on their help section... where i found that firefox was displaying all the nonbreaking space character entities where they omitted the semicolon at the end. Obviously IE catches this and displays it perfectly, tricking web developers into thinking that they can leave stuff out wherever they feel like. Anyway, i emailed the helpdesk and told them about this, and what did they do? They advised me to switch browsers to IE.
I'm ranting, sorry...