Is there any difference in major browsers' rendering across operating systems?

Question

I have long believed that the only difference as far as the rendering of major browsers on different platforms is concerned is operating systems' underlying font-rendering technology, everything else relying upon the same libraries included with the browser.

As far as my research takes me, this is something that front-end developers either believe or don't. It seems we can chose either. I'm in a bad spot because I've always believed there was no difference, and now I am being told that before I publish any piece of front-end-impacting work I must carry out thorough testing on Mac as well as Windows.

To be clear, I am aware of the differences in text rendering (Tom Phiney covers the issue in depth here: http://www.thomasphinney.com/2009/12/browser-choice-vs-font-rendering/). The grey area I cannot find any documentation on is whether or not there are any either disparities.

Are there any authoritative articles of a technical bent giving a definitive answer either way?

Answer 1

Though I'm not aware of any specific differences for browsers between operating systems (they are usually fixed pretty quickly after being found), you can check any specific site using BrowserShots.

Answer 2

Form elements tend to be OS-centric rather than browser centric. So that's one thing to check for cross-platform. But other than that, AFAIK, the rendering engines on cross-platform browsers tend to be fairly unified regardless of the platform they are running on these days.

Answer 3

There is no definitive answer, and is a subjective one also, different operating systems, are very much under the hood, have a different way of accessing the graphics (as in your case you mentioned font rendering).

So it is not really a fair question as such because it's like trying to compare chalk and cheese in the context of how different systems render the graphics. Don't forget, that in the case of Windows, there is a wider range of graphics drivers, for the simple reason that Windows has a large market share today (I wish it was Linux that had a larger share, I am a Linux fan).

Take Linux for example, not all video graphics manufacturers will open up their graphic drivers for it to work under Linux's X interface for competition reasons. Even though, as of today, the graphics are superb and smooth under X, due to the different libraries used to communicate with the graphics hardware, but you still cannot compare the graphics output to that of Windows as the underlying hardware drivers are inherently very different. The graphics are very mature and increasingly solid.

You could try copying over the true-type fonts across to Linux (but that is debatable in terms of copyright issues and EULA's) to see if the font rendering is any better...again this could be in violation of copyright etc...

Take wxWidgets, which strives to make the graphics the same across Linux and Windows, or QT toolkit, that is the very nature of what makes it portable and look the same. Mono is another example, the WinForms on it is quite mature and near-same as the Windows equivalent of the .NET winforms.

Again, as I have said, this is subjective and that is my opinion on it.

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.