Firefox V IE - why so different

[samandian]

Having submitted some galleries to LL I received a decline and in it was the suggestion to view the pages created in both IE and Firefox. Quickly i have downloaded firefox and looked at my page.

Whoooaaa! It looks a lot different. It appears to have moved some text and links to the left or right, changed font sizes and even put strikethrough on some text.

So here's the dumb questions?

Why does it do this?
How do i get it to look good on both browsers?
What is the advantage to Firefox over IE (i have read that it gives better protection), but is that all?

I checked my stats and i get 80%+ of my traffic using IE, just under 10% with Firefox and the remainder other browsers.

It also appears that many webmasters view material in 800X600, again my stats show my traffic to be roughly:

60%+ as 1024x768
17% 1280x1024
15% 800x600

Are my stats inline with most sites? How to best overcome these oddities in browser and screen resolution?

[swedguy]

Originally Posted by samandian

How do i get it to look good on both browsers?

Write proper HTML code and it will work in all browsers.

[MrYum]

Originally Posted by swedguy

Write proper HTML code and it will work in all browsers.

Exactamundo

Firefox is much less forgiving of bad code than IE.

One thing you can do that will help is to validate every page before you consider it live and ready for traffic. For the most part, if a page validates, it will look good in Firefox. If it looks good in Firefox, it will usually look good in IE. These statements are not always true, but are 'usually' true. Which is why I suggest the following;

Validate every page
View every page in both Firefox and IE

As to why Firefox...I use it first off because I prefer it's functionality over IE. I use it exclusively for site reviews because it's more secure than IE. Since moving to Firefox for 99% of my surfing and 100% of site reviews, I haven't had a single instance of malware hit my system.

As to the 800 pixels wide rule, this subject comes on on the board every few weeks it seems. The consensus of those threads is that continuing to build for 800 wide enables us to build for in excess of 95% of our surfers with no side scroll. If you start building now for 1024x768, you're pretty much ignoring 15% of your surfers...that's using your stats. I haven't looked at mine lately to see if they match up with yours, but those numbers sound about right.

At some point in the future as that 15% drops further, yes...the time will come to adjust to wider sites. However, that time has not arrived just yet

[Maj. Stress]

Without looking at your pages, I might also suggest declaring a document type so the browser better understands your coding (if you are not already doing this). And as mentioned above an html validator works wonders. You can use your favorite search engine and look for cse html validator. They have a free version. Or you can use the free online validator at http://www.w3.org/

[virgohippy]

Firefox just works better, if only because of tabbed browsing.

The differences between IE and FF aren't that much, but it's all the little differences that can add up real quick when you've got a lot of code doing a lot of different things.

And I agree swedguy. Simple, clean code works across all browsers. That's kinda the point.

Also, be aware that CSS is still pretty new and advanced applications don't always look the same in all browsers.