Does Firefox and Safari behave similarly regardless of OS?

Question

By that I mean if Firefox renders exactly in the same way on win/mac/linux and Safari on...
If not, what have you experienced?

Answer 1

They have been known to not render perfectly the same with specific versions, but they were bugs in the rendering engines. They should mostly be rather similar across OS, this also goes with chrome (linux version is in testing) and konqueror (there is a windows version) and any other cross platform browsers.

Answer 2

Other than different font smoothing methods between OSes which makes the text look a bit different and different font availability (not all *nix platforms have Verdana), they should behave the same.

Under Safari-Win, you can enable Mac-style font smoothing.

There are some differences, but those are attributed to bugs and are being fixed.

Answer 3

There are differences - a really obvious one is the usage of native controls by default. There can be size and sometimes layout differences between the Windows/Mac controls (i.e. Mac OS file upload looks very different from Windows).

The usage of native control and font rendering mechanisms is where you'll see the most differences in FireFox.

In Safari, while not officially acknowledged, there does seem to be some deliberate changes in the port. One was exposed a while back in a vulnerability report - Safari could be commanded to silently download files (including exes) to the users default download folder (the desktop in the Windows version) on both Mac and Windows Safari. However the vulnerability was much worse on Windows because when Apple ported Safari to Windows, the code that set the untrusted file security attribute was removed or disabled, resulting in no warning when you double clicked that "My Computer(.exe)" or "Apple Safari(.exe)" icon.

Answer 4

If you have the suspect, that there is a specific rendering difference between platforms (e.g., because a customer insists on experiencing some), I'd recommend Browsershots to clear the situation.

However, this is nothing for testing and debugging while developing. So I'm also curious to read the answers.

Cheers,

Answer 5

• Fonts look a little different, because of different font metrics, font availability, and rendering algorithms. Obviously missing fonts have a major impact.
• I've had bugs with differences in Flash on the platforms, which is not the browser, but relevant to the question. Linux has a z-index problem with flash movies.
• Never seen a JS difference between the same versions of both platforms