I think there are three main types of browsers, webkit, gecko (which FF runs off of), and whatever IE runs off of. With these three types, it can be difficult adding an html hack here and there to make a website compatible in all three types of browsers. Recently I had to do a hack for an add to appear nicely in FireFox. It was difficult, but we did it! When we viewed the site in IE it looked terrible because of this ad. It took us a good two hours to figure it out for all three types of browsers. You guys ever run into any problems? I especially run into problems with IE and this makes me wonder why people even use it anymore!
Trident is IE's engine. You forgot Presto, the engine for Opera : ) I run into problems, but on my types of pages it's usually problems with Firefox more than anyone else. They are certified bugs and all I can do is hack around them and wait for some programmer to go fix them : ( Safari also has some bugs that... bug me. Actually, everyone has bugs that bug me. But Firefox's bother me the most. Not because there are so many, but because they often never get fixed, and workarounds are not posted on teh interTubes as often as IE's workaraounds are. Because IE comes with convenient ways to spoon feed it different code (either Conditional Comments which I abhor or * html/ *+html hackz in the CSS), IE bugs usually don't make me break a sweat. Yes yes, one should not be hacking much at all in any case, but I write a LOT of forms, and every form except the inputfield SEARCH quickies, they ALL have fieldsets and legends, which means I get to write 15 bazillion extra lines just to have something for Firefux, and it still looks like shit anyway. Actually I could rant all day about Firefox bugs and how they are contributing to global warming, AIDS, cancer and natural disasters around the world, so I won't : )
Check out conditional comments; http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html You can add extra CSS depending on the browser... One size doesn't always fit all.
I know this is the great debate, but I really do not like IE at all. I use Safari for most of the things I do because for HTML and most javascript if it works in safari it looks ok in IE. BUTT, that is not always the case, it is a real buggar, because there are so many people that still use IE even with its problems, I once spent a week working on a cross browser code using AJAX so that it would work in the top three browsers, it worked fine in all but IE after a while I just gave up, IE just would not toe the line.
Does that surprise you? Back in the day the world only knew about Internet Explorer (Netscape had a cult following) and as such was built for and around it. Its only relatively recent that IE has had reason to worry about competition. Its only when you start developing for the internet that you even notice theres a problem. The change won't happen overnight.
To the contrary, Netscape was the dominant browser back then and after IE came out, it still held half the browser market. Before Netscape, there was Mosaic, which actually became Netscape.
In all honesty most of my problems come from IE. IE drives me nuts sometimes. However, I usually design using Firefox so naturally everything looks in FF and usually off in IE. I'm sure if I designed using IE and then viewed in FF I'd have the same problems. For just general use though, I strongly prefer FF.
Yes it can be a bit difficult and challenging at times. What I usually do is code my site so that it works well in Firefox and then fix the bugs for IE.
I usually code compliant with W3C standards So, the site looks almost well in all browsers, but anyway there is always something to fix for IE. That's why I often hate this retarded browser...