home page not displaying correctly in firefox

ultimatehandyma · #1 August 24th, 2005, 01:27 AM

Hi everyone,

I have just had it pointed out to me that my home page does not display correctly in firefox!

I have just downloaded firefox and my homepage is a mess, all the tables are mixed up?

Does anyone know why it does this and should I worry about it, I mean how many people are likely to use firefox?

Thanks in advance!

ultimatehandyman

**MishY** · #2 August 24th, 2005, 01:52 AM

Hi,

The answer to how many people are likely to use Firefox is that an incredibly large amount of people do. If you have a statistics program for your website traffic you might be able to see the proportion of how many of your own users use what browser.

I would have thought globally Firefox will be used by perhaps up to 8% of the market. Although my quick google search couldn't find any proven statistics.

Firefox is more sophisticated at rendering webpages than IE. IE forgives a lot of basic coding errors. So does Firefox, but if the error is just wrong it will render it wrong - this is not a design flaw but rather a design feature.

This should be your starting point to fix your problems: http://validator.w3.org/

Put your URL into the top box and hit the Check button.

The responding page will list all of your HTML errors and give you as much info as you should need to help you rectify those errors. If your website can pass one of those validations it will more than likely work in most browsers.

The W3C is responsible for providing "web standards". These standards are put in place to ensure well-coded, accessible websites are created, and not the proprietory mess that are websites that are coded purely for IE.

BTW by not checking your website in different browsers you leave yourself open to missing a huge audience sector. For example - your website might not work in MacIE which is based on IE5 - but then a lot of Mac users don't use IE they use Safari which likes proper code like Firefox.

If you get stuck with debugging your code with the validator let us know I'm sure we can help

unclejunebug · #3 August 24th, 2005, 09:04 AM

Everything that Mishy said is true. A lot of people use Firefox nowadays and it would be a bad idea not to check your pages compatablility with other browsers. Another thing you may be running into is that Firefox, IE, Netscape, and other browsers do just look different sometimes in the way that they render the code. The differences aren't huge, but they do exist. So even if your code is 100% correct there may be a few things that just show up a little different.

uripyores · #4 August 24th, 2005, 09:24 AM

Number of Firefox downloads ....currently 82,224,371 and rising.

It went up over 1OOO while I was writing this.

ultimatehandyma · #5 August 24th, 2005, 10:34 AM

Thanks guys,

Your answers have helped a lot!

I'm away for a few days now, but I will try and fix it over the wekend.

Thanks again for all of your help, it is greatly appreciated.

ultimatehandyman

ultimatehandyma · #6 August 27th, 2005, 01:16 AM

Hi Everyone,

I have got the errors down to 12, for now but it seems that quite a few of the errors are caused by the hit counter!

Does anyone know a solution to this without removing the hit counter?

Thanks in advance

ultimatehandyman

**rockboy** · #7 August 27th, 2005, 01:34 AM

Sure looks better in Firefox.

I wouldn't worry about validation errors in the counter code as long as it functions ok. The validator is an excellent tool to find the coding errors that can cause display problems. Just fix what causes problems with the page and ignore the counter code.

**MishY** · #8 August 27th, 2005, 01:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ultimatehandyma

Hi Everyone,

I have got the errors down to 12, for now but it seems that quite a few of the errors are caused by the hit counter!

Does anyone know a solution to this without removing the hit counter?

Thanks in advance

ultimatehandyman

Well done on the error fixing UHM - your site does look a lot better in Firefox