Page Display Difference Between Firefox and IE?

[JohnOB]

I wish to start an online HTML course, and one of the requirements is Internet Explorer. I currently use Firefox, as I am having major problems with IE constantly closing down as soon as I open it so installing Firefox was a simple solution.

I assume IE is required for my course to preview the html pages I create, I wondered if Firefox would do just the same, or are there some differences between web sites displaying in these two browsers, so if I was doing a site previewing using Firefox and got it looking fine, is it possible the lecturer could view the same page on Firefox and it would be messed up, or vice versa?

Thanks

 

[richcleverley]

Pages may well look different in ie to firefox depending on how they are coded.

The instructor probably wants them to work in ie because it is teh most used browser there is. I always develop in FF and then test them in IE to see if I need to change any of my code. FF is more standards based while IE can do some odd things to pages.

I suggest you work out why IE isn't working properly on your pc and get it sorted, then you can code pages wo they work in both browsers.

Richard

 

[Vragabond]

Pages can look different in FF or IE. This can either be attributed to non-supported elements or attributes (IE does not support a lot of advanced CSS2 features and all other browsers do not support some IE proprietary tags), incorrect rendering of elements (IE refuses to fully follow the W3C standards and interprets certain -- usually more advanced -- features in its own proprietary way), browser confusion at incorrect code (if you use invalid coding techniques, browsers are left to determine how to render certain things and their "logic" can differ) or simply different default application of styles (different default paddings or margins on specific elements).

The first difference can be easily avoided. Using a syntax that is fully supported by all the modern browsers, you can make sure there will no problems with your page being displayed differently on account of unsupported things.

The second one is the most puzzling but also the most common. IE in particular renders certain things in a strange fashion and usually requires weird solutions to make it behave properly. These problems usually arise with more complex designs, so you should be ok with simpler things. Here's a nice list of these IE bugs:

http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

The third one is quite common as well but can be easily avoided. By running your html and css through online validators, you can eliminate 99% of the problems that come from incorrect syntax. Your motto should be: do not even try to determine browser differences until you have: a) correct doctype; b) valid html; c) valid css.

The last can be a pain if you're trying to do pixel perfect designs across different browsers. IE and (mainly all) other browsers apply different default styling on certain elements, be it just different values (larger or smaller margins and paddings) or different methods to achieve the same (margin instead of padding). If you do pixel perfect design, it might be useful to begin your css by zeroing out all the margins and padding to ensure all browsers begin from the same place.

All that said, Richard is right -- make sure you test in both browsers, though I will agree with him and say that you should design in/for FireFox and check and adapt to make it work in IE as well. Because IE should not be trusted enough to expect that the website that looks good in IE will look good in other browsers.

 

[kjv1611]

JohnOB,

You may have some bigger problems if IE is crashing on you. Have you tried checking for any viruses or spyware on your machine? Or have you tried downloading an updated version of IE. It shouldn't normally do that.

If you think it may be some sort of "malware" related problem, then you might want to try getting that solved over in -Virus/Spyware discussion Forum, forum760

If that isn't the culprit, then next I'd go to the Windows forum for whatever version you have - 98, ME, 2000, XP.

Then after that is solved, you can use both Firefox AND IE to test your web pages, because of the reasons mentioned by the other tek-tippers.