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Having browser compatibility issues

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photographerguy
Hello,

I'm pretty new with CSS. I've been reading some tutorials and finally starting to grasp the concept of it. So naturally I am frustrated that the page I layed out at work looks completely different when I brought it home. I've been doing some googling on this and starting to read some articles.

Could some of you share your workflows that you use to handle this?
I am a Mac user and would prefer to not use Windows anymore (won't have access to a windows box 24/7 anymore). I'm pretty sure checking my work on a windows computer with IE is the only way to check compatibility, is this true? Mac IE sucks and is useless.

Do you all design with 3-4 browsers open at once to 'check it' every step of the way? Please share any information on this that you feel, I'm trying to learn. i'm just frustrated and would appreciate any help. Thank you.

P.S. I would appreciate all workflows (win/mac/linux) I wasn't trying to be an angry 'I hate windows guy' lol.
Atomo64
Well, if your CSS doesn't work well with IE you don't even have to worry why, since IE scks, and it doesn't have full CSS support. I have a similar problem as yours... I use linux, not Windows, so I only make sure that it looks ok in Konqueror, Firefox and Opera. If the three of them show the page ok, then it means that it works Smile
Kaneda
Mostly, I develop the site in Firefox, regularly checking with IE 6.0 (at this point, I've started to ignore versions of IE previous to 6.0 completely). When the site is done, I'll test in Opera, Safari+Konqueror, Mozilla+Netscape (just for good measure). If anything needs to be changed for those, it will usually be tiny fixes.

If you develop in XHTML (or HTML 4.01 with doctype), and stick to web standards, in many cases you'll get consistent results on most browsers - even IE 6. The cases where you don't, you'll gradually learn how to get around.

Current market realities (somewhat sadly) dictate that you should probably check IE 6 for Windows (maybe in Virtual PC on MacOS?).

But ignore IE for Mac completely. It's absolutely and utterly abandoned and unsupported, not only by users, but also by MS themselves (no more security updates, you can't even download it anymore, etc.).

Also, you can't use IE Mac as a reference for how pages display in IE on Windows - they're different products, with different renderers, each having their own set of bugs.
Gieter
Atomo64 wrote:
Well, if your CSS doesn't work well with IE you don't even have to worry why, since IE scks, and it doesn't have full CSS support.


IE may be bad (actually, it is bad), but a majority of users still surfs on the Internet using Internet Explorer. So I wouldn't say that you don't have to care at all. If it's really a problem, you should try to find a way around. But I agree with you, the CSS "support" of Internet Explorer is terrible.

I usually develop a site first using Mozilla Firefox, and then I check Internet Explorer and Opera too.
photographerguy
Sadly IE is the browser with the biggest marketshare. If I will be designing a website for a business, I would think it will have to look good in IE. Alot of people like us (web design, graphics design, programmers) know what is good and bad, but we are actually a really small portion of people. Alot of people don't even know to use any other browser than what is the default on their computer. People that will pay us to design their sites may not know hardly anything about computers, all they want it it to look good. They don't know or care what goes on behind the scenes.

Is virtual pc with IE the only option for this? Is there any other Mac browser that behaves like IE?

Thanks for the help.

To eberybody else - Please continue to add any relevant info to this post.
Marston
Atomo64 wrote:
Well, if your CSS doesn't work well with IE you don't even have to worry why, since IE scks, and it doesn't have full CSS support. I have a similar problem as yours... I use linux, not Windows, so I only make sure that it looks ok in Konqueror, Firefox and Opera. If the three of them show the page ok, then it means that it works Smile
Too bad that like 70% of internet traffic uses Internet Explorer on a Windows box... You're isolating a hefty part of your audience, buddy. As long as you don't unnecessarily complicate your design, it should look good on most, if not all browsers. Keep it simple, you dig?
DoctorBeaver
My HTML editor uses IE as its default browser. Personally I use Opera anf Firefox so I check my layouts in those too.

1 of the biggest problems I've noticed is with paddings & margins. Some browsers include them in the width, others add it on. Plus, some add a margin automatically. I always set them explicitly to 0 unless a value is required..
Kaneda
DoctorBeaver wrote:
1 of the biggest problems I've noticed is with paddings & margins. Some browsers include them in the width, others add it on. Plus, some add a margin automatically. I always set them explicitly to 0 unless a value is required..


Which is why I ignore IE versions previous to 6.0 - lately on most sites (that includes major non-tech sites in Denmark) I've developed, IE 5/5.5 usage is around 1-3%.

On all modern browsers - IE6, the Gecko browsers (Firefox, Mozilla), the KHTML browsers (Konqueror and Safari) and Opera - if you supply a strict doctype in your HTML, the W3C box model will be used. That is, the width property of an element = the width of the content area (i.e. excluding margin, border and padding).

The only browsers used by more than 1% of Internet users which don't support the W3C box model are IE versions previous to 6.0. So ignore them, and the users will follow - at the very least, eventually they'll get IE6 Wink

But no, don't ignore IE6. Razz
Atomo64
Gieter wrote:
Atomo64 wrote:
Well, if your CSS doesn't work well with IE you don't even have to worry why, since IE scks, and it doesn't have full CSS support.


IE may be bad (actually, it is bad), but a majority of users still surfs on the Internet using Internet Explorer. So I wouldn't say that you don't have to care at all. If it's really a problem, you should try to find a way around. But I agree with you, the CSS "support" of Internet Explorer is terrible.

Well, there are some things that you can't just do with IE... and anyway, when a page doesn't works at all with IE, or it looks really bad, I add a link to Firefox and to Opera Smile

Marston wrote:
Atomo64 wrote:
Well, if your CSS doesn't work well with IE you don't even have to worry why, since IE scks, and it doesn't have full CSS support. I have a similar problem as yours... I use linux, not Windows, so I only make sure that it looks ok in Konqueror, Firefox and Opera. If the three of them show the page ok, then it means that it works Smile
Too bad that like 70% of internet traffic uses Internet Explorer on a Windows box... You're isolating a hefty part of your audience, buddy. As long as you don't unnecessarily complicate your design, it should look good on most, if not all browsers. Keep it simple, you dig?

Well, most of my audience is not a common house user (you can take a look at my site and then you will notice that)... and for example, I'm developing the FDB (you can find an old version of it in my site)... and it's default desgin/template makes use a lot of CSS, and I had to spend a lot of hours to improve it so browsers like IE, that doesn't have a good CSS support, can work well.
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