If you open this page: http://www.ugeek.com/test/mozillatest.htm ...you will notice that the top table cell background appears to be white in any version of Mozilla (or Navigator for that matter), even MS 12, while the bottom table cell background is blue. If you open up the URL in Internet Explorer 5 or Opera 3.60, then both tables appear blue. This is really annoying as a web developer, as we need to make sure that if we want an empty cell with background color, you have to put in a " " character. That's no so bad, but if you want an empty table cell with color, and with a height less than a text character, you can't do it in Mozilla or Nav. For example, I want a blue cell 3 pixels high, and empty. Normally, I'd make an empty cell with blue background, and set to height=3. With Mozilla, I must put in a   character to make the blue show up, and because of that, the height of the cell I desire (3) is overridden by the height of the   character (usually 10 or 12, depending on what font you have set). Please fix this, I beg of you! I see no bad effect of fixing this. In fact, I have always believed that Nescape misinterpreted the HTML spec and caused this bug. Even Opera - the spec lovers, get it right. The good effect of fixing this is that we don't have to keep shoving   characters into web pages and we have more control of the height of empty cells. (by the way, I'm making this bugzilla entry with IE5, but I have tested the page with Mozilla MS12 code)

You may find it useful to have a look at bug #8113 which specifically tracks this issue. Note that the nature of the problem is known -- there is however a CSS2 requirement that TD cells with no content be transparent (read the details at bug #8113). There is also a proposed solution that would allow one to make a cell opaque through CSS 'empty-cell:' style. I'm going to mark this bug as a DUPLICATE of bug #8113, but feel free to add your comments to bug #8113. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 8113 ***

Verified dupe of bug 8113 "Empty cell's bgcolor not rendered"