Question: I am desperately trying to find a way to get this working. I have a menu that use images for links. But in IE and FF there is an annoying border around the image that I don't know how to get rid of.

Would you be able to quickly tell me the CSS attribute to avoid this effect.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Antonio

Answer: 
The operator `==` compares object *references* for equality. The `equals` method is intended to perform *value* comparison -- for example, two distinct `String` objects that represent the same sequence of characters will compare equal if you use `equals`, but not if you use `==`.

As far as I know, operator overloading was left out of Java as a matter of language design. (Why the language designers built in an overload for `+` over `String` boggles my mind. Convenient, yes, but IMO that's cheating.)
`==` compares references, not values. The use of `==` with object references is generally limited to the following:

1. Comparing to see if a reference is
null.
2. Comparing two enum values. This works because there is only one
object for each enum constant.
3. You want to know if two references are to the same object

`a.equals(b)` compares values for equality. Because this method is defined in the Object class, from which all other classes are derived, it's automatically defined for every class. However, it doesn't perform an intelligent comparison for most classes unless the class overrides it. It has been defined in a meaningful way for most Java core classes. If it's not defined for a (user) class, it behaves the same as `==`.