My website is looking so different in IE, Firefox and Opera. Is this because of CSS or what?

Question

And what can I do about it?

Answer 1

Well, CSS can play into it, but mostly it's about how the browsers are programmed. They render different elements differently, and they are preset with different margins and such which can alter the way things appear on the page. What makes it worse is that not all CSS attributes are adhered to by all browsers, and some browsers, like IE, have proprietary attributes that only they render. So, all in all, it's very difficult to have a site look exactly the same across all browsers, across all resolutions. Not that it can't be done, mind you, but that's why the web designers get the big bucks!

Answer 2

That is because some browsers don't support all the commands in CSS an HTML. (check the list at http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp )
As far as I know, Opera supports just about anything with Firefox right behind it, and IE last. Also, Opera is the only one of the three that passed the Acid2 Test. There is a good summary on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

So if you actually wrote the code (HTML&CSS) then the only thing that you can do, is to rewrite the code in such a way, that it will look the same in all browsers. If you are using PHP, you can figure out witch browser the user is using, and parse apropriate code.
But if your page was automatically generated, you can't do anything.

Answer 3

Most likely CSS is the problem -- or actually, the browser makers' different ideas of how to interpret CSS. Basically there are "standards" published on how these things are supposed to work, and the browser makers all vary from the standards a little bit, unfortunately in different directions.

The "best" solution is to design a different CSS (or entire website) which works for each browser, and detect which browser a user is using, and direct him to the appropriate version. Easier said than done -- it takes some javascript or other programming, and then you have to set up the multiple sites or stylesheets.

The other solution is to not use CSS for layout, construct the website using old-fashioned tables and such for layout, and check each page in several browsers to make sure the different text sizes don't mess things up.

Answer 4

It could be CSS. Try setting opera to identify as either Firefox or Explorer. You can do this by:

Tools
Preferences
Advance

Somewhere in the advanced tab there will be a button that you can put on your Opera toolbar to identify as Firefox or Explorer. This should help.

With FF you can try this addon
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/

Try the webstandards test to how see badly IE sucks

Answer 5

Here is a site that will help: http://www.anybrowser.com/