Articles
[18/12/2009] Why my website looks different on different browsers/operating systems?
The last time you saw this wonderful image vivid with colors and you wanted to incorporate it into your website, you realized that it did not look the same when you viewed it online. Sometime ago, you asked your web designer to use a particular font that you saw on paper but the results did not match. This is because while on paper, the designers can regulate the effects, the colors and the presentation, the web designers cannot do the same on a web page. It is not the ability of the web design company sitting in London who created your website but some factors that are beyond our control. Some of the factors that change the appearance of a web page are operating systems and browsers. Different operating systems have different ways of representing the same object and different browsers interpret the same objects differently.
Operating systems
Different computers are loaded with different hardware as well as software. These determine the look and feel of a page on the screen. An operating system is one such player. A Macintosh OS treats text differently from other operating systems. They allow texts to be displayed bigger and far smoother than on other OS. Not only this, the screen is brighter and so an image might look paler on other computers. The appearance of graphics such as icons is also very different on different operating systems. We talked earlier about the font that you desired to use in your website but didn’t fit your expectations. This is again because of the operating system. The fonts that are already installed in your computer’s OS will determine the ones that will be visible. Hence we are restricted to that list. To use the one that is desired but not available, one must use it as a graphic. Another reason why colors look different on different computers is that the colors that can be displayed by a particular computer be limited.
Browsers
The use of browsers is to display the web page on the internet. They have different options for displaying and hence your website looks different on an Internet Explorer than on a Mozilla Firefox. The web site designers build your websites in the form of codes which are looked at in different ways by different browsers. Since the code is open to various interpretations, their display also varies. The browsers may or may not follow the rules incorporated by the web designer to determine the display of various elements; however these have to be matched with the defaults built in by the people who programmed the browser. Hence both, the rules of the website and those of the browser determine how a website ends up being presented. Earlier on, there were a lot of browsers that came into being and to survive, the programmers built in features that separated themselves from the rest. These worked uniquely on their browsers. Over a period of time, some elements became universal while some specific ones worked in their browsers only. This disparity in consistency with all the rules used in displaying a web page has reduced but not been completely eliminated over the years. The more common reason for a display to be different is the existence of bugs in a browser. It would do a world of good to install and use the latest versions of the web browsers to avoid these errors.
