The BBC's homepage along with its various section homepages are pretty inflexible when it comes to content. They've stuck with catering for an 800 pixel width (in my view this should now be increased to 1,024).
Also in Internet Explorer, scaling your fonts has no impact, which has meant that the BBC has allocated fixed amounts of space to content. Main story titles take up two lines; the main story summary takes five lines, the second and third stories are allowed five lines; and all of the links towards the bottom of the page are allowed one line each.
(As an aside, the BBC has always had a problem scaling links, as highlighted by Alan Simpson in this comment to the editor on 1 July 2004. The then editor Pete Clifton promised it would be fixed within the month. Still waiting.)
This often means that content is shoe-horned into the space allowed. This is something I've noticed for some time, but which was specifically pointed out to me by my friend Elise. (Typically, there are no glaring examples I can see at the moment, but they crop up frequently.)
In Firefox, all of the fonts scale, which I believe goes against the look and feel that the BBC was looking for. However even with today's design, reasonable amounts of scaling don't adversely affect the feel of the homepage. The links at the bottom begin to wrap on to a second line, although the extension of the leading articles' summary sentences beyond the bottom of the associated images soon eventually causes some white space to appear.
While there will always be examples in which editorial has to be tailored to fit its medium, this happens way too often with the BBC. They will need to put more thought into its look and feel as Firefox gains market share, and make sure that assumptions it made in 2002/3 when they redesigned the homepage (e.g. hard-coded font sizes are obeyed by the browser) are updated accordingly.
