My friend Kirsten e-mailed me earlier today, and one of the things she mentioned was that my website looks “completely different” on a mac and on a wintel box. This got me a little curious, as I try to make sure that things are fairly compatible across the platforms — with one caveat. As I mentioned in a post last July, I’ve switched my layout from a table-based layout (pros: works [mostly] in all browsers on all platforms; cons: kludgy, browser-intensive to render, and considered poor layout by current web standards). By doing this, I’ve more or less nuked the appearance of my site for older and non-compliant browsers, but I wanted the simplicity of CSS layout for site redesigns and to be able to say that I’ve got a truly compliant site.
However, as I know things can be a little tweaky from browser to browser on the two platforms, I decided to try a little experiment. I set up a link (the one mentioned in my previous post) that uses JavaScript to open a 800×600 window (considered the minimum necessary screen width for designing these days, as so few people run their computers at 640×480 anymore) with no toolbars or anything to get in the way. I then tested my main page under 10 different browsers, 7 on the Mac and 3 on the PC, to see how they appeared. The results (updated on 02.20.02 and 02.27.02) are in the rest of this post… have been deleted, as I didn’t want to bother with re-uploading all of the graphics to the new server. The end result was essentially that Mozilla-based browsers worked great, IE didn’t, and Opera, Omniweb, and iCab had definite issues.