i have a mac. i wonder which browser (safari or firefox) i should use to develop my prototype, firefox or safari?
because i have noticed they will give different effects. some things working in safari dont work in firefox and vice versa.
could someone also give me some advices of how to deal with incompatibility problems.
The general advice is to use a doctype, which forces the browsers to all render the same way. Though in practice I've found this to not work out, so I don't do it. I generally work side-by-side, starting in FF and moving to others to test. It helps if you build from a solid framework (i.e. jQuery or similar) and just stick to the "basics". At least this is my approach; YMMV.
Both. You do want users of both browsers to be able to navigate your site, right?
In my work using FireFox as base has worked very well. In my experience it is "closest" to standards and there are wonderful plug-ins for web-development. If your main problems are css incompatibilites you can create the fixes for each browser when you get it right in FF.
I previously used Firefox as my #1 browser for development, employing plugins like FireBug and it's many additional plugins but now I use Safari and find it's Javascript debugging and DOM inspection excellent.
The answer is to use both though - but you'll always use one more than the other and I find Safari to be a better fit. Once I'm happy with Safari I then do the final double check with Firefox, then go back to 1990 and check with IE6
You should use FireFox and Internet Explorer 8. Probably should test your code with Google's Chrome too. Chrome OS, that more or less is mainly the Chrome brower, will be out soon if it isn't already with NetBooks sold by cell phone companys.