Anyone who has ever really gotten into web design I'm sure knows all the fun that comes from making their website cross-browser compatible. This meaning, your website looks the same in both IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and any other browser. For the most part, Safari, Opera, and Firefox all work about the same so there isn't always the need to change things to make it render the same in those browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer on the other hand brings about a challenge sometimes.

Microsoft is known for pushing for it's own standards, the biggest one now being OOXML (Office Open XML) but that's a different story. W3C created the HTML, CSS standards so that web developers and designers would have a good guide and of course a good standard for building sites. With few exceptions all the browsers follow these, even Microsoft to an extent. What mostly annoys me about IE is how Microsoft incorporates a few differences in the way IE renders compared to lets say Firefox. The biggest one I've run into is say the width of a box. In Firefox and the W3C standards, padding is added on to the width, in IE it's incorporated into the width of the box. So lets say you want a box with a total width of 500 pixels and a padding of 5 pixels. In Firefox, you would want to set the width to 490 pixels and then set the padding to 5 pixels (490 + 5 + 5 = 500). In Internet Explorer, all you would need to do is set the width to 500 pixels and the padding to 5 pixels. Here is what I mean:

Now I will say that I kind of like IE's way of doing it better, at least in a case like this, but I would much rather have ONE standard than have to worry about tweaking things for the different browsers.

There are work-arounds to avoid this issue, but the annoyance of having to do so is still a pain. I'm hoping the reports that IE8 passes the ACID2 test are true because that would indicate a change for the better in my opinion, but I guess only time will tell.

I'm still not as experienced a web developer as many others out there so I'd be curious as to how they handle the problems caused by the slight differences in how IE handles things as compared to the other browsers, or what other differences even exist. I'm not trying to hate on Microsoft with this post, I just think having a set standard that ALL browsers follow would make the job of a web developer so much easier rather than having to test things out and tweak things just so they render properly across all the browsers.

This definitely shows us why standards are good to have.

So web developer gurus, what other bugs have you found that exist between browsers?

Tags: webdevelopment, ie, firefox, browsers, html, css