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How do you cope with OS X browsers in web design?

ANTdod

ANTdod

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 2, 2007
9
0
Hi,
I am just about to switch and buy a MBP. I saw a few web pages I have built on a Mac (Safari/FF) and they look a bit different that on IE. It is understandable as Macs generate fonts a bit different and Safari/FF are not the same as IE and FF on PC. How do you make sure that sites created on Mac looks good on PC? I am asking about other solutions than Windows on a MAC.

Thanks
 
i've done web development for the last 10 years, all on a mac.
i test my work on both PC and Mac computers. while there will be some differences in appearance, and slight differences in how things appear in layouts. generally, it's not that difficult to make sure that html code and css appear almost identically on both platforms, and in various browsers.

ANTdod said:
Hi,
I am just about to switch and buy a MBP. I saw a few web pages I have built on a Mac (Safari/FF) and they look a bit different that on IE. It is understandable as Macs generate fonts a bit different and Safari/FF are not the same as IE and FF on PC. How do you make sure that sites created on Mac looks good on PC? I am asking about other solutions than Windows on a MAC.

Thanks
Click to expand...
 
I design toward standards, which works well on Firefox, Safari, Opera and the like, but IE not always so. If you design toward standards you won't have too many issues for Mac.
 
When I was doing web development, I found that IE would constantly mess the page up, so I always targeted to FireFox- at least people on both platforms could see it properly. Safari seems to be about the same as FireFox, and I believe IE 7 has gotten a little bit better.
 
How do you cope with Internet Explorer in web design?
Click to expand...
:cool:

Design to standards and you're 80% there. The rest is just tweaking to make sure IE gets it right. I rarely have problems with Firefox on PC. The fonts look different - aliased - but everything else is the same.
 
ANTdod said:
Hi,
How do you make sure that sites created on Mac looks good on PC?
Click to expand...

Internet Explorer makes even the best web designs look mediocre. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps their lack of anti-aliasing of fonts, I can't quite put my finger on it. But if you make sure to test your site on all browsers on both platforms then you can make sure it at least looks passable.
 
Thanks for your opinions. With IE 7 coming on board it is even less funny! A lot of people design for IE7 and sites don't work on IE 6 (and opposite). I will do as you suggest - make sure that I respect standards and small
differences won't matters.

Regards
 
jng said:
:cool:

Design to standards and you're 80% there. The rest is just tweaking to make sure IE gets it right. I rarely have problems with Firefox on PC. The fonts look different - aliased - but everything else is the same.
Click to expand...

I agree with the above post. In my opinion, Firefox usually represents web standards the best on both Mac and Windows with Safari behind and IE following at last position.

Cheers.
 
As many have said--start by designing to standards. From there, I open up Parallels and run the site in IE (yeah, I pretty much paid for Parallels and Windows so that I could get angry with IE6 from time-to-time).

Most of the time, things are coo that way...
 
It's pretty simple, design to standards (Alpha PNG's, etc) and then open the site up in IE. Use a seperate CSS file to move everything around so that you can get to the information (even if it doesn't look as pretty, ever see an alpha blend PNG in IE6?) and then use CSS to make a nice message about how the site doesn't support IE6, use Firefox or Safari.
 
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