There’s Cross Browser, and Then There’s Cross OS
Cross browser coding is one thing that plagues the thoughts of web developers on a constant basis. Tweaking some CSS for IE is no big deal, maybe some other browsers aren’t behaving to your liking, but you live. As a semi-recent crossover user to a Mac, I’m starting to find Firefox behaves very differently across the board.
It’s well known that FireFox isn’t that great for Mac. Camino does what FF is supposed to do much better, but it’s hard to make the switch when you’re so used to the UI. For me, the first thing I look at on any webpage is the Alexa rank and PageRank in the bottom right of my screen. The bottom left has the colour picker that also lets you see the element names. Also in the bottom right is the page load time and FireBug.
Various other plugins slow down my browser, but they become such an integral part of my daily routine that it’s not something I’d like to give up. Mozilla has been quoted as saying they’re proactive in the improvements for their Mac version, but it’s not a Mac style UI we need.
FireFox is setup for low speed machines. That’s why there are so many “hacks” to make it work faster. You’re not hacking anything, just tuning to fit your setup. This could be because Mozilla is aiming at the lower end users to build market share, but really, who has <256mb RAM nowadays?
While for some reason, lowest system requirement was a battle Safari decided they needed to win, why not stop catering to potential users and start caring about the three major OSs (Windows, OS X and Linux) and make it all work the same way across everything and cater to the middle user. Make your browser optimized for a more 512MB RAM setup, so when I’m using my 1GB of RAM FF doesn’t eat almost half of that!
Back to the point originally, Firefox displays a web page differently in different OSs. This is like the IE vs. FF battle all over, but it’s like a civil war. I can add things to fix padding issues by adding redundant styles, but when using things like position:absoulute and relative, it should be exact. And it’s not!
Maybe there’s an OS issue with default styles in all web browsers, while this baffles me, the browser should have to compensate for this, not the developer. HTML conditional comments I can do, but now do I have to bust out the PHP to find the OS of the user to decide which style they get?
Has anyone encountered cross platform issues with the same browser? Mainly FF here, but if there’s anything else it’d be good to hear.
Leave a comment
David Hopkins
September 21st, 2007 at 6:56 AM
I have had a few weird bug with Safari for Windows, but since I don’t have a Mac, I can’t tell if they are cross-browser. A point I would add is that browsers (some or all - im not sure) inherit some properties from the OS, so in some cases inconsistancies could be due to the OS. However, I can’t see how the OS could have any affect on CSS.
One related expirience I had was on a website that was using a lot of percentages to set the width of divs. It worked fine on my Windows PC but when the client opened it on their computer it was all over the place. If I wasn’t so familiar with Microsoft’s sloppy engineering it would have taken me days to figure out that the problem was is the the Windows XP theme takes a few pixels away from the browser’s window. The client was using this, while I use the classic theme. This was only in IE of course
Martin
September 21st, 2007 at 9:20 AM
I have found that the Compete plugin was absolutely hosing my Firefox. Firefox would stall out for 5 seconds or more, then finally come back to life. As much I was wanted to increase my numbers at Compete, stalling out Firefox was not worth it.
Neil Turner - Acopic Web Design
September 21st, 2007 at 10:03 AM
Obviously the interface differs from platform to platform but to be honest I’ve not noticed many rendering differences between firefox PC and firefox Mac. Good point Martin made about plugins - I’ve had a nightmare with a few Firefox plugins which I had to scrap in the end.
Andy
September 22nd, 2007 at 7:33 AM
Personally I just hate the way that Firefox is STILL unstable. I find it crashes more than Internet Explorer. Oh, and the fact that on Mac it doesn’t use native form styles which is just silly. It uses some type of ugly form styling which reminds me of Win 95.
Lewis
September 24th, 2007 at 4:14 PM
I highly recommend you try a service called BrowserCam [browsercam.com]. It lets you see screenshots of your site on all different platforms and browsers, and you can even remotely access them. It’s expensive to buy through there, but if you buy it through Fundable.org you can get it very cheap and it’s invaluable to any serious web developer.
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