  The light-front (LF) canonical quantization of quantum chromodynamics in
covariant gauge is discussed. The Dirac procedure is used to eliminate the
constraints in the gauge-fixed front form theory quantum action and to
construct the LF Hamiltonian formulation. The physical degrees of freedom
emerge naturally. The propagator of the dynamical $\psi_+$ part of the free
fermionic propagator in the LF quantized field theory is shown to be causal and
not to contain instantaneous terms. Since the relevant propagators in the
covariant gauge formulation are causal, rotational invariance---including the
Coulomb potential in the static limit---can be recovered, avoiding the
difficulties encountered in light-cone gauge. The Wick rotation may also be
performed allowing the conversion of momentum space integrals into Euclidean
space forms. Some explicit computations are done in quantum electrodynamics to
illustrate the equivalence of front form theory with the conventional covariant
formulation. LF quantization thus provides a consistent formulation of gauge
theory, despite the fact that the hyperplanes $x^{\pm}=0$ used to impose
boundary conditions constitute characteristic surfaces of a hyperbolic partial
differential equation.
