I agree with Quentin. It doesn't make sense as to why you want to do it like that. It's part of the Semantic Web concept. You have to plan out the objects of your web site for future integration/expansion. Another web app or web site cannot interact with your content if it doesn't follow the proper use-case.
IE and Firefox are two different beasts. There are a lot of things that IE allows that Firefox and other standards-aware browsers reject.
If you're trying to create buttons without actually submitting data then use a combination of DIV/CSS.