hello,

Why do pages look ok in Firefox and out of place in Explorer ?

Ah yes, the necessary adjustments required to be made to your page so they may be viewed nicely by each browser. Unfortunately, all browsers are different so you really need to tweak your website for both .. these are the two most popular browsers and are the recommended ones to use for tweaking ..

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Telling me to tweak for each browser doesn't seem like a good solution. I am told m site looks horibble on a Mac. I don't have a Mac so how would I know and what would I tweak? This seems like a catch 22. Does anyone have any tips for what to do and not do to make your site most likely to work with PC's and Mac's?

thanks,

Craig

There's a version of Safari for Windows you can try. I have almost all the popular browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE) so that I can see how my site will appear on all of them.

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Even if Opera is better .... how would that solve the problem of how the website you build will appear the same on other browsers? Short of making everyone use Opera on their computer to view the web, it wouldn't make any difference.

@ Craigrhoff

You can visit this site, http://browsershots.org/ , type in your URL for the page you've published and shortly after, you will be able to view a screenshot of your page in all sorts of browsers on different Operating systems, (Linux, Windows, Mac), and different screen resolutions. It's a handy site and the only drawback I find is: your screenshot only shows you what can fit on the screen from the top of the page down. i.e. if you have a page longer than a screen, you won't be able to see the bottom portion.
Hope this helps.
regards,
Rick

I think you missed the real point, Rick: FireFox, although popular, is flawed and has not been able to improve to the level of being universally stable or functionally reliable.

When it comes to IE-based (meaning unilaterally acceptable and homogenious to the world's majority of Users) browsers, Opera was the first to break free from the confines of "generic IE clones" without dysfunction, later to be followed by Mozilla's FireFox (which continues to be inherently limited and annoying to Users), and finally by Safari, the "new breed" of fully functional and stable browsers (actually the second most favored browser recommended for general and professional use).

And the word is getting around, even with the slow to understand general public. People are getting tired with all the problems, as evidenced by all the web chatter in designer forums and blogs everywhere, and are seemingly "re-discovering" Opera and Safari in light of them being recommended by the many utilities that are emerging such as vMail (video email), CoolIris, and the like.

Your question whether to continue to design websites "acceptable" to FireFox and others specifically is valid, given that you must assume there will always be a percentage of Users who rely upon FireFox primarily (for whatever reason), just as you must allow for website functionality to include Windows 98, Windows 2000, XP, XP-Pro, and even Vista. Well, maybe not so much for Vista: word spread rather quickly on that one, right?

It's not a battle of the browsers here, Rick, only trying to define a deeper understanding of the real issues of web design, and how our myopic vision may not always reflect the real world.... just like the real world is switching in droves to both Opera and Safari since IE7 sucks, Vista is abandoned, and reverting back to XP means they still have to find an alternative to IE6 being pushed into oblivion by Microsoft. Numbers don't lie, and many are not returning to FireFox, deciding to join first-times users of the other browsers after 'search and review.'.

I guess to be "accurate" we will just have to see how tall the wave is and who can ride the curl ......

Actually I don't know where the information that Opera is gaining such strong ground comes from?

Here are the statistics:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

If you notice, Opera is up all of .3 percent in a year. Firefox is up a full 6 percent in the same period.

And no matter what browser we might find the "best" or "worst" we need to design our websites for the browsers the average people are using.

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