Why do my Web designs never work on PC?

Question

I design Web sites using a Mac and, without exaggeration, the bulk of my time is spent "troubleshooting" finished sites to look right in Explorer on a PC. They always look fine on my Mac, then I fire up the PC to cross-platform test and they are invariably full of weird white gaps and misaligned elements that take hours of hit and miss tweaking to correct - even though, as I say, Macs seem perfectly capable of rendering them with no trouble at all. Hate to say PCs are s*** (which I always end up yelling during this frustrating process!) but I really can't see any other explanation. If Macs can interpret HTML smoothly, and PCs need so much extra messing around, what else can I say??? Are there any geeks or code monkeys out there who share my frustration or can give me some helpful hints (short of buying one of these diabolical contraptions)?

Thanks for the screenshots address! That will be extremely useful. And, FYI, Explorer does work differently on Mac and PC - even the same versions.

Answer 1

Well, its cause IE, Firefox, Opera etc all use slightly different "interpretations" of standards that have been set. Mac translates very differently due to the OS (sorry about that) It is simply part of the designers challenge these days. When you do check on a PC be sure to check with several browsers as well, you will see that what you get isn't what you thought you would get! Check in Windows and Linux OS as well. Bummer, but if you want to design, you have to know what is happening in all of them. It does get easier the more you do because you will learn what does and doesn't work. If you are CSS coding, it is much easier to fix. And if you code with raw code even easier than with the magic "design" packages that you never know what code they output!

Here is a great tool to help though

http://browsershots.org

You can load and let them show you your work in different browsers on different OS

I found that when I switched from IE to Opera or Firefox to use for design, I had a much easier time than trying to go the other way. Microsoft and its web browsers just simply refuse to actually "conform" they think they are the standard and the rest are wrong!

In short, welcome to the "Browser Wars".. designers are caught in the middle!

One other footnote, just remember that the MAC is actually the "odd man" out here. The majority of internet users are still PC people and THAT is your audience. So perhaps you might want to switch and design for the masses, not the minority of users. Good design will work in both regardless, its just easier to fix when your working on the smaller issues not the big ones. (Fixes to look good in Mac are minor. Fixes to look good on PC when coming from a Mac are hard to find!) Just my opinion.

Answer 2

to assume it's a pc issue is a little bold.

in fact it is incorrect to say that, it is an internet explorer issue - microsoft don't feel their browser needs to conform to the same web standards that every other browser in the world aims for. also they take years to fix major design bugs and don't build in the latest functionality either and when they do it's under the guise of a microsoft 'version' which again forces web designers to 'double' portions of their design to be internet explorer compliant, and 'rest of the world' compliant.

i dare say if you installed internet explorer for mac and viewed it in that you'd have the same issues - that doesn't mean a mac is useless does it and would contradict the mac's ability to 'render html smoothly'. :)

html isn't interpreted/rendered by the machine, it's interpreted/rendered by the browser and you will find that anyone who designs websites has to endure the same annoying experience at the hands of microsoft - mostly because of internet explorer's shaky handling of css.

for the most part there's little that can be done. if microsoft don't want to make their browser web standard friendly they don't really have to, and they have no reason to since web developers have no choice but to put in 'workarounds' for internet explorers shortcomings - internet explorer is (sadly) still the most used browser in the world.

Answer 3

I find sometimes the pages look okay in Firefox but then in IE they have issues. The program you are using to create the web pages should let you test the site on several browsers. Usually it's a browser issue, not a PC or Mac issue.

Answer 4

It's a browser issue my friend, you need to frequently check for cross-browser compatibility issues so that there would be less debugging and tweaking on the later part.