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.
Related
I'm developing a website for a customer, and I've tested it with the major browsers on Windows.
Now I'm facing some little differences between Chrome Win and Chrome Mac (same version).
These are really minor things, but the customer spotted them, so I'm wonder.. there is some reset I can do via css to make the two version as similar as possible?
I think I've to work with the -webkit prefix of the browser default, do you know any good walkthrough?
I mean: there is some base .css I could use to reset Chrome and to force it to render as similar as possible even cross-platform?
Thanks!
UPDATE: the differences I mention involves mainly font-sizes letterspacing and something related with the height and line-height of the elements.
What you're running into is default browser css definitions. It's always a good idea to reset or normalize your CSS when starting a project so all browsers behave the same way with the base elements.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ << reset. Sets all common CSS to 0. This one can be difficult to use since it means styling EVERY element you want to use. ie lists no longer have any default padding or list style.
http://necolas.github.com/normalize.css/ << Normalize gives you some default settings, but still tries to bring all modern browsers to the same starting point.
When it comes to prefixes really only some of the CSS attributes use them. There is a good explanation here: http://webdesign.about.com/od/css/a/css-vendor-prefixes.htm
List of which browsers use which prefix:
Android: -webkit-
Chrome: -webkit-
Firefox: -moz-
Internet Explorer: -ms-
iOS: -webkit-
Opera: -o-
Safari: -webkit-
Also keep in mind some CSS properties need to be defined differently for older versions of IE using filters. Opacity is one of those.
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/
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.
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.
As of right now I believe only Firefox support -moz-border-radius property. I am surprised that twitter uses it.
Are any other browsers planning on supporting this or does CSS3 have something like this in the works?
Edit: I also found -webkit-border-top-left-radius and then the CSS3 version
So when is CSS3 coming out?
CSS3 has border-radius.
For now, Mozilla- and WebKit-based browsers have experimental support, -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius. It's not bad to use them now, as long as you understand they are temporary measures until they are properly implemented. I would expect it's not too long before you see full support for border-radius in Mozilla, Firefox and IE. (Well, hopefully IE.)
Update: as of August 2016, with border-radius being natively available in all native desktop browsers (and most mobile browsers, not to mention), the stringency of using -moz-border-radius, -webkit-border-radius and similar is being slowly relaxed.
Because the CSS3 spec hasn't been finalised, Mozilla and Webkit decided to implement their own method of rounded corners, doing it in the correct way, by adding the vendor-specific tag at the front.
This is done so that when the CSS3 is FINALLY released, should they change how border-radius is supposed to work (eg: the order of the parameters), then none of the sites using the vendor-specific methods will be broken. Mozilla and WebKit can just go ahead and implement the W3C style and developers can slowly move over to that.
It's not too surprising that you're seeing some websites using it, especially for something like rounded corners where it's not going to make a massive difference to the user experience. And I mean, it's just IE users who are missing out, and they deserve everything they get.
It bugs me when people talk about CSS3 coming out. It's not a complete spec like the previous ones. It has been broken up into separate modules that may increment their versions independently.
So Selectors Level 4 may make Recommendation before CSS Backgrounds and Borders Level 3 does.
So, will CSS3 arrive? Eventually, but not all a once. So don't wait for it, start using it now (where applicable).
CSS3 has something like this in the works.
According to this, IE 8 will not support border-radius.
Any CSS property that starts with a dash (e.g. -moz, -webkit) is a browser-specific property.
This allows browser vendors to experiment with new CSS properties. Doing so is a common part of the process for writing new CSS specs, to allow web developers to see how the properties work and raise issues.
Hence you’ll find a lot of CSS 3 properties, like border-radius currently implemented in some browsers with vendor-specific extensions.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with using these on production sites, as long as you’re aware they’ll only work in the one browser.
CSS 3 should be out any decade now :)
Browser-based properties are only meant for interim fixes for that particular browser, and are supposed to be deprecated when either the W3C adopts them into CSS, or not. I wouldn't rely on them to be cross-browser or even be kept for the particular browser.