I hope it is OK/useful to ask a probably hard Firefox/Linux question here rather than finding a Firefox forum (please advise me on forum choice if I won't get a good answer here).

There is a website I need to use that displays fairly well in IE, not well but usable in Firefox on Windows and very badly unusable in Firefox on Linux. I think the fault is in the website, not in Firefox, but as I have no influence over the website, I'm hoping to find some Firefox settings to kludge around the problems.

I'm pretty sure it isn't an issue of the version of Firefox. On Windows I'm using 2.0.0.12. On Linux I tested with the Mepis build of 2.0.0.11 and with the Debian build of 2.0.0.12. I downloaded the 2.0.0.12 build from mozilla.org to try to rule out any Debian specific issue, but I couldn't figure out how to install it in Mepis (I'm still a newbie at such things) and that was a long shot anyway, very unlikely to make a difference.

The biggest problem is (I think) caused by the following chunk of the HTML from that site:
That first frame contains some worthless stuff at the top followed by the most important controls for use of the website. In Firefox on Windows, I think I see it start to draw the page with the useless stuff filling that frame section and only the topmost pixel row of the important part visible, then redraw with the important part fully visible. Anyway it ends up with the important part visible.

In Firefox in Linux it just draws that section the way Firefox in Windows seems to start drawing it. It doesn't ever correct it. The important part is never visible even if I change the window width after the whole page is drawn (there are other sites that I access in a older version of Firefox on Windows that make similar drawing errors but fix them if I make any change to the window width after the page is drawn).

In IE, if I use CTRL-scroll-wheel to increase font sizes on that page, it consistently scales all the many different fonts in all three frame sections. It changes the size of the top section almost enough to fit the larger contents and it adds scroll bars to the top section so you still have access to all of it.

In Firefox on Windows, if I use CTRL-scroll-wheel to increase font sizes on that page, it inconsistently scales a subset of the different fonts in each of the three frame sections. But leaves other fonts unchanged. It changes the size of the top section almost enough to fit the larger contents but doesn't add scroll bars to the top section so you then can't access all of it.

In Firefox on Linux, if I use CTRL-scroll-wheel to increase or decrease font sizes on that page, it inconsistently scales a subset of the different fonts on just the main/middle frame sections. It doesn't change the top section in any way, so you still can't access any of the useful part of it.

Back in that HTML I quoted above, I see scrolling="no" noresize which would seem to contradict the behavior I'm seeing in Windows, especially in IE. Is there any setting (in a style sheet or wherever) that would override the HTML so the content of that frame section is completely visible (or better yet, just the bottom of that frame section is visible)?

you might type about:config in the title bar, then filter for frames and see if there's any settings that might help you out. Or you could try a user agent that will make firefox pretend to be IE6.

Wow! I had only randomly skimmed through the documentation for about:config and through about:config itself. I somehow never noticed that filter was there.

On Windows Firefox, I just tried
layout.frames.force_resizability true
That lets me manually resize that frame after it is drawn! If it does the same on Linux, it is a usable work around for the biggest problem with that site.

In case I'm misunderstanding and missing some better work around, can you explain why that would help? The website is perfectly willing to talk to Firefox the same way it talks to IE. It sends either of them content that apparently doesn't fit in the top frame. The trick is in how the browser responds to unscrollable content not fitting, change the frame size to give a bit more to the unscrollable frame and a bit less to the following scrollable frame (as they both seem to do on Windows), or leave the unscrollable frame unusable (as Firefox did on Linux).

I don't know if it would help at all. But I just was talking to someone who was confusing a site rendered with css that they thought was frames and changing the user agent might help with that. So basically, I just lost my confidence of what in the world you were talking about.

You could always try a trick that been around for a while in the Mozilla family of web apps: customize how it appears on your screen, regardless of how it's programmed at the website you are browsing.

I refer to your user profile in /home/<username>/.mozilla/firefox/<random string>.default/chrome, and two files which you can use to customize how Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird/(Seamonkey/Iceweasel,etc) apear: userChrome.css and userContent.css.

You can find more info here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserContent.css
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css

I guess this will be an interesting project

So now I can manually resize the frame in Linux. But in Linux that frame has a lot more content than it had in Windows Firefox or IE and it has a big gap between the first line of content and the rest. So I needed to make it 600 pixels high before I reached the part I wanted. That will take some investigation.

I was also surprised the about:config filter for "frame" found only three items on Linux and only two on Windows. I would have thought there were a lot more aspects of frames advanced users would want to override.

The current worst problem with that web site is its export button. In IE that opens an Excel Window. In Firefox it just opens another Firefox window with a slightly messed up version of the data in CSV text. Fairly often I will need to copy one (always the same) column out of that data and paste it over a column in an OpenOffice spreadsheet. But it is quite a few steps to get from the text in a Firefox window to extracting a column in a form the spreadsheet understands.

I'm sure there is some way to tell Firefox to automatically open that type of whatever it is in the spreadsheet instead of by itself. But I don't even know how to find out what the website even says the stuff is. By the time I see it, it is just text in a new window.