Seeing as I mostly use Firefox for my browsing the ‘net, I didn’t really give it much thought as to how any of my blog themes rendered in any other browser. Until now.
Friday morning, my wife called me from work to ask me if there was something wrong with our family’s blog. I told her “not that I know of, why?” She then told me that she was looking right at it and it looked “funny”. So, I loaded it up in my browser and checked it out only to find that it looked just fine. I was momentarily stumped until it dawned on me: she was using the computer at work.
I asked Donna what browser was she using and she said IE (Internet Explorer). I felt a sudden urge to check this out myself and when I loaded up IE on my machine, I too saw what she did: the layout was skewed.
She asked me if she could load Firefox on her computer and I told her that she probably could unless there was a constriction or policy concerning downloading. She checked and found she could do it so I guided her through the installation of Firefox. Now she can view web pages as they were intended to be viewed. Not in IE’s version of what they should look like. Actually, in Opera or Safari either.
I did some checking to see if the other browsers rendered the sites similarly or what-have-you. What I found was odd as some were the same where others were not.
I checked each of my blogs in Firefox 3, Opera 9.62, IE 7 and the latest offering from Flock. Safari is Mac specific I even downloaded Safari 3.2 for Windows to see if it fared any better. My results are below.
This blog’s theme rendered correctly in Firefox 3 and Flock where it didn’t in IE 7, Opera 9.62 or Safari 3.2.
So now, my idea of searching for a theme that would be compatible across all browsers is going in the File 13 drawer for now. The developers of these themes obviously need to do a little more research before releasing them to the Wordpress public, wouldn’t you think? As to whether this is an ongoing issue to be resolved at a later time or if the developers are indeed working on this, we’ll have to wait and see. I’ve contacted both the Wordpress folks and the developer of this blog’s theme to see if there’s a remedy in sight. Hopefully, thee will be one soon.
Update: 11/17/2008
After commenting about the issue with this theme rendering in a skewed manner in other browsers, the developer (or one of them) replied back that one of my Widgets had incorrect code in it. Specifically, a closing Tag was missing. I did as he instructed and the theme now displays correctly in all browsers now.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Brian of TemplateLite.com for his help in looking into this. It’s not very often that a developer himself will go out of his way to help diagnose an issue with their work. Especially when it turns out to be the fault of the blog owner and not theirs. Kudos to you Brian! 
Moral of this story? Simple. Check and double-check your code assuming you know how. If not, then ask for help.
See, a lot of folks take for granted that what shows correctly in one browser will show the same in all browsers. This isn’t necessarily true and this post shows that. Whether by your hand or the developers, something might go unnoticed and the page will not work out. You owe it to yourself and your readers to always make sure.
[...] available today. Check this post out on one of my other blogs about my recent discovery of Wordpress Themes vs Web Browsers for the 411 on this [...]
But seriously, shouldn’t everyone be using Firefox instead of IE? Should anyone be using IE? But it is a good point about code. Though sometimes my computer geek Hubband isn’t too helpful when it comes to my blog…… But I’ll keep him anyway.
LOL Yeah, IE is ok for some that really don’t do much more than surf the web. Those of us that might do banking, buy online, etc. are much better off using Firefox or Opera possibly.
I agree on keeping the husbands too. We need good homes.