well since i started web desighning i've always used internet explore (why?) well when i first tried FF2, i wasn't a "web-designer" then so i didn't care much about css and htlm stuff, i din't like it and one of the reason was beacause a couple of the sites i visited wasnt firefox compatible. but anyways recently i was desighning a site for this community. so like two weeks ago i downloaded FF3 for testing purposes. in IE the site looked great but what i found was that in firefox the site was horible, as bad as they could come. so since firefox was better with compatibility i decited to desighn it based on firefox standards and it looked great on both FireFox and internet explorer.

despite internet explore being more popular around the regular web surfers i think if you desighn your site towards firefox's standards it would work and look great on both IE and FF.

so anyways did any of you guys had the same experience before and do you agree with my logic?

Back when i first started learning HTML, the only browsers i knew of was Internet Explorer and Netscape. Netscape at that time wasn't as appealing as Internet Explorer, and turned me away from it because of that. But the web design class i took was all about Internet Explorer. One of the teachers was one that was certified by Microsoft, so that could have played a major role in what browser to design for. But even when that teacher retired and a new one came in, Internet Explorer was still dominant in the class room and there was no mention about any other browsers. It wasn't until after a couple of years later that i learned about other browsers. Memory here is a bit faint, but Opera pulled me in. For my websites i choose to design for Opera, because i feel less limited in Opera. Thanks to tests like the acid test, i can verify whether a display error is because of my code or the browser. It took Firefox 3 just to implement CSS features that Opera, when only Firefox 2 was out, already had. Opera also supports more HTML 5, from what i've seen, than Firefox. No need to include Internet Explorer in what kind of CSS features it supports, as it should be obvious. But even though Firefox 3 improved a lot in CSS support, it still doesn't render everything like one would expect it to. But there's one minor bug that was introduced in Opera 9.5 that deals with outlines (or borders) where it overlaps elements and makes things look ugly, where in Firefox it looks fine, and wasn't fixed with Opera 9.51. But in many cases, if not most, building for Opera will in turn make it look the same in Firefox.

The best browser to begin web designing is Firefox.

I my practice, I begin my HTML & CSS coding for my new designs for Firefox, then once the coding is done I'll make some changes to the code, usually CSS to fix the things in IE 7. I then refer how the page looks in IE 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3 and Safari. As for IE 6 I usually add a seperate CSS file that contains all the IE 6 specific CSS hacks and fixes for the bugs and include this CSS stylesheet with conditional comments.

Opera is also a great browser, but it is really pain when your web applications become more dependent on Javascript.

Some times Internet Explorer sites don't look good in Firefox. Make it for firefox and it looks fine for Internet Explorer. Double profit!

to be honest, it's best to make a website which works for all browsers, or at least the top 3 most popular browsers. I personally design my websites for Firefox as I know the majority of my visitors will be using firefox. But you should aim for designing a website which works for internet explorer and firefox. If it works for those two browsers majority of your codes will look perfectly fine in any other browsers. The simple coding will work across browsers but more complex coding such as javascript and a few css attributes will look different depending on browsers, so keep that in mind.

safary is the best for css I guess, firefox and opera is doing good also.. but I don't like FF3 did not incorporated some things available even in IE..
in IE lot of things look or must be written different compared to other browsers.. but I will never neglect IE users;

This post has been edited by Sica-GURU: Jul 6 2008, 02:59 PM

If you want to tailor your site for multi-platforming, let me just mention:

NEVER EVER use .png formatted images!!!!

Internet Explorer fails dramatically, both at rendering them, and at displaying them in conjunction with jpgs and other types.

It also, for some unknown reason, likes to ignore transparencies, displaying the whole thing as white instead of the supposed transparent bkg...

Only in IE6... IE7 renders them properly, as far as I know.

i think firefox 3 is better to design websites, because in my opinion that one is a little more restrained as, what align codes etc work.. but yea i find it odd when you design beautiful websites in firefox and when you turn on the internet explorer, the same website looks like complete crap, and everything is not aligned/off