Our website looks great in all browsers except IE 6-8. We're not even using many CSS3 features. These are just plain old IE rendering bugs (like margins and padding). Before trying to apply a bunch of IE specific fixes, I was wondering if anyone knows of a javascript library that I could apply to fix a bunch of these typical bugs?
Update: Like I mentioned, we're not necessarily using any "modern" CSS3 features nor HTML5, so these are just typical IE 8 bugs where IE renders things differently than all the other browsers.
Go for excellent normalize.css reset that takes care of most of it (also used by HTML5 Boilerplate)
Normalize.css is a customisable CSS file that makes browsers render
all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. We
researched the differences between default browser styles in order to
precisely target only the styles that need normalizing.
As for getting support of CSS3 for browsers that don't support it, check out CSS3Pie
You don't need JavaScript; just use a CSS reset file: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/cssreset/
That will work across most browsers to not only fix IE issues, but also make your site render more uniformly over different browsers.
You might wanna take a look at this one: https://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
or this: https://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/
Related
I am aiming to support just IE10+, and the newest versions of the most popular browsers. I am wondering if there is a css reset just for those specific browsers ignoring old IE and Moz fixes.
I couldn't find any, but perhaps I have overlooked some when I was searching on Google. I plan to create my own of course, I just don't want to redo work if there is a library out there I can utilize.
Thanks!
Modern as in HTML5 resets?
Blue Print Framework has a nice reset
http://html5reset.org/
Then there is YUI, http://code.google.com/p/reset5/...
A CSS base and reset is meant to apply to all HTML elements you use, so that the browser never has to reach into its default styles to render anything on your page. A few elements have been removed* in HTML5, so you could remove these from your reset if any are present, but that might be over-optimizing. For what it's worth, the YUI 3 CSS base and reset account well for modern browsers.
EDIT:
Correction: They have been marked obsolete; compliant browsers such as IE10 still need to support them, so unless you are sure your page/application will never use any of them, they should not be removed from your base/reset.
Normalize is worth a look as an alternative to a CSS reset. Instead of resetting all styles, it targets the ones that need to change to change to give you sane, consistent results across browsers in a smaller file size.
This means that there is not so many styles to clutter your dev tools debugging. It also fixes some common bugs. It's a mainstream project, that's well maintained, focuses on modern (ie8+) browsers and is used by some high profile sites.
Read more about it here.
Similar to disabling JavaScript in browsers, is there a way to disable support for various CSS3 properties in Firefox or Chrome to quickly confirm a page is rendering OK if support for certain properties isn't there? I know it's only a presentation layer, but I'm just hoping there's a more efficient way to test against this without using old browsers, especially if Modernizr is being utilised.
A project called deCSS3 manages to disable a large majority of CSS3 properties through the use of a bookmarklet that overrides and neutralises their usage with !important rules.
A recent addition to the project is "Modernizr class toggling" for an added level of testing when Modernizr is utilised.
Even if there were a way to do so, would it help? Each browser has its own quirks, so there is no guarantee that e.g.:
Firefox - CSS3 = Older Browser
CSS3 isn't a set of additions to CSS2, it replaces CSS2. The backgrounds and borders module in CSS3 includes border and background as well as border-radius and box-shadow. If you 'turn off' CSS3 you turn off all CSS, and even if you could disable the new stuff Tom's answer is correct - that wouldn't leave you testing anything that actually exists in the real world.
If you need a way to "turn off CSS3" then I don't think you're thinking about/implementing progressive enhancement/graceful degradation properly. You should be starting with non-CSS3 stuff, then enhancing your site with it. When you build the non-CSS3 foundation and test it in your target browsers, then adding CSS3 shouldn't change anything (browsers ignore styles they don't recognize). If you sandbox your CSS3 in its own stylesheet, then you can tell old versions of IE to completely ignore it (or, if you're using stuff that's only partially supported in IE9, can tell all versions of IE to ignore it) to save a download.
That said, CSS is handled by the core rendering engine, so in order to view a page without CSS3, you have to view it in a browser that doesn't support CSS3. It sucks, it means you have to have several browsers, and even virtual machines (or physical machines) to test very well, but such is the state of web development, unfortunately. Theoretically, you should be testing in several browsers, anyway, and already know that IE6-8 have their own quirks that don't even relate to CSS3, and should already be set up to test them (so, therefore, if you need to test old versions of other browsers, you can install them in your IE test environment).
There's a useful add-on for Firefox called "User Agent Switcher" which allows you to bump your browser rendering down to an older version of IE (the iPhone rendering is also pretty useful). That should help you double check.
Can anyone tell me the best way to ensure asp.net sites look the same when view in IE, Chrome or Firefox?
I've just finished one which in testing seems fine in IE but not the other 2.
I have not used CSS on this site as its not that big, I just formatted the masterpage as I wanted it.
Could that be the problem?
I usually code for Firefox first. That makes things match almost 100% in Chrome, Safari and IE9 usually. Then I go through and test in IE 8 and 7. Minor adjustments are typically made within the same CSS file. For example, IE7 usually needs to have dimensions of a container explicitly set, where most modern day browsers don't require it and render things properly.
In those rare cases that you do need to style something specifically for one or more versions of IE, use conditional comments. Here are some good links on conditional comments and how to target specific browsers and versions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html
Unfortunately you will need to use CSS to get this to look similar in all browsers. I say similar as it is unlikely you will ever get it looking exactly the same.
Basically you will need to use the conditional CSS tags http://www.javascriptkit.com/dhtmltutors/csshacks.shtml
I would recommend spliting out the style to the a CSS and getting that working in Chrome and Firefox. Then use the tutorial linked and add in IE hacks to make it look better.
There isn't an easy way of making a site look the same in all the browsers. As caveman_dick said, maybe it's even impossible. You have to use CSS and sometimes javascript...
But to help you, you can use some programs that simulate different browsers engines, so that you could see how your site behaves. Just google browser simulator. :)
I've noticed that Safari and Chrome behave the same when it comes to HTML and CSS. However, there are differences between Firefox and Safari (and hence, Chrome as well).
Sometimes things can look great in Firefox, but the CSS misbehaves in Safari and Chrome. The cause of the mis-behaviour can be attributed to "anything" (as opposed to in IE 6 and 7, mis-behaviours are usually caused by excessive paddings/margins that cause elements to float out of position). For example, while debugging CSS of a website for Safari the following attributes have caused cross-browser misbehaviours:
position
height
width
padding
margin
Is there a common pattern to Chrome and Safari CSS debugging?
Can you guys offer insight into the differences between Safari and Firefox that may help me with my cross browser debugging?
Thanks
Typically, and anecdotally, the majority of large differences between cross-browser rendering of the same page are due to:
invalid (x)html, use the on-line html validator from the W3 to ensure the validity of the mark-up.
lack of establishing a base-line for CSS (as #Jeroen suggests: use a css reset).
use of CSS which varies in support from browser-to-browser, particularly the newer CSS 3 (transitions, column-count and box-reflect1 particularly, though there are many, many others).
This may, or may not be, a proposal for inclusion in CSS3 by the World Wide Web Consortium, the only references I've found for it are exclusively with the -webkit vendor prefix, which suggests that it's probably a proprietary extension. I can, however, hope that others will follow suit. It's so much easier to apply reflections with css than with js/php...
I have noticed differences, but not that dramatic. As usual, most differences can easily be overcome / avoided by using a css-reset. Do you use one on the pages you are talking about?
This css difference is because, there is a default styles difference for firefox and chrome browsers. click this links for default css sheets
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/layout/style/html.css
http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/css/html.css
While developing the webpage itself we have to make sure of overriding this default styling commonly for both browsers. using the browser extensions like -webkit and -moz etc..
After development and in debugging state, we need to override this default styles. I don't think we have any common debugging for this. correct me if i am wrong.
I dont understand why the HTML5 website I am working on is different in all browsers. I know it must be CSS, but I dont know what.
on Chrome: http://slackmoehrle.com/chrome.png
on Safari: http://slackmoehrle.com/safari.png
on IE 7: http://slackmoehrle.com/ie7.png
on FireFox Mac: http://slackmoehrle.com/firefox.png
the style sheet can be found here: http://slackmoehrle.com/css.css
Can anyone shed any insight?
Many are saying that browser detection is not a good method, but I dont see what to do to make this all work in the various browsers
UPDATE:
without using a CSS reset: http://slackmoehrle.com/test/without-reset/
with using a CSS reset: http://slackmoehrle.com/test/with-reset/
Have a look at using a CSS reset stylesheet
My personal favorite is Meyer's: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
The only real problem with browser detection is the fact that if newer version of browser will support some new features (rounded borders for example), but you still will be doing some workarounds.
Better approach is to use feature detection, so you will be able to use some specific browser capabilities if it has support of them and some graceful degradation pattern when something isn't supported.
For CSS most pragmatic approach is to have reset CSS included for all browsers, then have some common CSS rules which look the same in all browser and additional CSS files for different browsers which contain rules that should be different for different engines.
From my latest experience it's almost always possible to maintain only two versions of these DIFF files - one for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and another for IE family. And use feature detection for JS.
First of all, no version of IE can handle the new elements of HTML5 without javascript help. Only modern browsers can and IE is not a modern browser.
As far as the other browsers go, I'll have to look more but I've not had any issue with any sites I've done but, then, I don't use CSS resets and set all the CSS on the elements myself.