Firefox and Internet Explorer..

I'm not sure if you are a html and css coder yourself, but, if you code a website, you need to fix it for IE afterwards virtually every time - this causes a certain amount of frustration (unsurprisingly). Firefox is closer to being standards-compliant (ie the way most people accept a web page ought to be rendered) so most people who have to deal with it prefer it to IE.

Admittedly, it is a necessary evil, however, microsoft are perfectly capable of creating a much more favourable browser for web designers and merely don't seem to bother to - firefox is opensource so all they have to do is use their rendering engine if it is that difficult for them.

Actually they are Mike.
They have yet to make IE standards compliant like just about every other browser is.

Louis if you can put in a link to the page so we can check out the source code.

I hand code my websites ... simple coding, nothing fancy, both HMTL and CSS. Yet, the sites looks just fine in IE and lousy in FF.

I can do table cell heights and look fine in IE, but FF ignores them. Or I won't specify any table cell height and yet FF makes them twice as tall as IE. Weird.

12px verdana in IE looks totally different than in FF (clunkier). *shrugs*

Since, according to the stats for each of the sites I admin, at least 70-80% of the visitors use IE ... I leave it alone. When the scales start to tip towards FF, then I will have to figure out how to tell both browsers to read the same code the same way.

If something looks odd in Firefox but OK in MSIE, it's most likely because the website/webpage does not follow the W3C specified standards. Microsoft, for some reason, decided to somewhat create their own standards for HTML code.

This is, however, expected to change with the arrival of IE 8 which should be more standards compliant and Microsoft acknowledged it may create problems with those pages created specifically with IE 6 and IE 7 in mind as IE 8 will apparenly no longer use some of the "specialities" found in the previous versions of IE.

So as strange as it sounds, if you have a webpage that looks good in IE 6-7, but bad in Firefox 3, chances are, it will look bad in IE 8 as well.

And keep in mind that if your pages look broken in Firefox 3, they most likely look broken in Opera and Safari too. In other words, the html rendering of IE is so "specific" that even Microsoft plans to abandon it.

When I write any html code, I make sure it looks OK in both IE 7 and Firefox 3 and whenever possible, that it also passes the W3C validation at The W3C Markup Validation Service . Sometimes the design looks slighly different (mostly due to IE's perverted way of handling margins) but it must not look broken in either of them.

That said, if you are wondering "who is right" - i.e. if a page looks OK in IE 7 but wrong in Firefox and you are wondering whose fault it is, most of the time it's IE to blame. IE 7 is seriously outdated in its core.

By the way, 46% of my web visitors use Firefox, 42% IE.

Tomas

I do prefer to use Firefox but I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on these points.

I've also been doing software and website development for many years and I haven't found that I've had to tweak and tweak for IE. Pre-IE6, IE dominated the market so much that you really didn't have to concern yourself with other browsers. There were a few well known quirks in IE6 that could easily be compensated for in the stylesheet and those are taken care of, for the most part, in IE7.

I want to make sure that a visitor to my sites has a good experience so I'm going to support the major browsers (IE and Firefox) and as many minor ones as I can. I think it is a bad idea to exclude one browser or the other and I'm as likely to complain at a corporate client who wants their website IE only as I am a Linux geek who wants to block IE in favor of Firefox.

Lastly, IE's popularity varies a lot based on the niche. On tech niches, you're likely to see at least 50/50 usage, often with more Firefox users. On non-tech hobby and other general audience niches, you'll see much heavier IE usage, in the 75-90% range, and IE users tend to convert better too.