It may be interesting and fun to make your own web site. However the way each browser (IE/Firefox/Opera/Chrome) handles the HTML/CSS codes leaves you with many headaches. Although my browser of choice is Firefox, there is still a large user base for Internet Explorer. I can say that roughly as much as 70% of users out there are still using IE because it came with Windows and also due in part to ignorance or unfamiliarity with other alternatives.

Having played around with IE/Firefox/Opera/Chrome browsers, I found that Firefox/Opera/Chrome loads a web page faster than IE. I think Chrome is the fastest of them all because of its simplicity. Though I know of a friend who is a diehard Opera browser supporter (he will probably comment on this page once I post this up!). I prefer Firefox because of the two toolbar add-ons from Google and Yahoo that I used a lot. This toolbar is only available for IE and Firefox but not for Opera and Chrome, thus limits my advance usability with Opera and Chrome. If you don’t need Google page rank indicator and Google/Yahoo bookmarks accessibility or any of the toolbar features, then Opera and Chrome could be a good alternative choice.

In most general cases when coding HTML/CSS, the web site should render according to what you have programmed. However there are differences in the way each of the browser handles the code.

For aligning by just using <div> tags and CSS codes, IE renders the page badly. Sometimes just to solve the alignment problem I just throw in the towel and use tables instead which according to current HTML/CSS coding trend makes for bad programming practice. Not much of choice if no matter how you try to sort out the HTML/CSS code and the alignment ran for IE, but not for the other browser, then the use of tables had to be adopted to fix it until a better way of coding it from CSS could be found.

For JavaScript, I noticed that Opera has a different way it handles some of the codes, and it wouldn’t come out the way I wanted it to do. It is not so much the alignment but the way JavaScript is handled by Opera. It actually reduced the web page functionality when the JavaScript did not function like the other browsers.

And for Chrome, there was one CSS code which controls the display block also handles the page differently. Though this was not a big issue, just a loss on the nice display but otherwise the web page functioned without any major issue.

In most part, how should you code your web page? As usual code it according to majority. Even though I don’t really like to use Internet Explorer, I still must make sure the HTML/CSS will work well with IE since this is what the majority of users would be using. While for the other less popular ones like Opera and Chrome, I could try to fix it if necessary, but if it was not such a big issue, I would just leave it as is. It would just be a minor annoyance. However being a little fussy about having a properly working site, I may one day just try to tweak such errors and make it work.