It might be because I am using the Firefox browser now.

A little bit of technological history... there is a group that designs and sets the worldwide standards for the web... for HTML and how certain commands are supposed to behave.

Web browsers are supposed to follow those standards, so that when web page designers set up the code for the page, they know how it will be interpreted by browsers.

Notice I said "supposed to."

Back when Netscape and Internet Explorer were battling to be the dominate browser one thing they both did was add features to their browsers. Some of these features were things that were not addressed in the HTML standard and some were slightly different ways of interpreting the standards. As a result, Netscape and Internet Explorer would display some pages somewhat differently.

Flash forward to today and almost every browser available has things that will make a page go all screwy when viewed. It makes it very difficult for web designers... instead of just coding a page to the standards, they have to test their page on different browsers and on different platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) and if something doesn't work in one browser, they have to change the code so that it will work in that browser but change it in such a way that it still works in the first browser. Sometimes it is a challenge to get a page to load correctly in all the different browsers. Usually "correctly" is often thrown out the window... just having it open "acceptably" is usually the goal.

Many web designers don't do that... they may only code for Internet Explorer and nothing else since that is the most popular browser. That's not a good idea for a commercial site, for example, because you don't want to turn away customers who may be using other browsers.

Making things even more complicated is how "fancy" our web pages have become... we don't only expect text, pictures and links in a flexible layout... we want animated graphics, flash presentations, items that hide and show as you move the mouse around the page, live media, things like "speed video" .

So which browser does it "right"? there is some irony there. Internet Explorer is the browser that most often disobeys the web standards. Almost any other browser adhere's more strictly to the Web Consortiums standards. Therefore Internet Explorer is most likely to be displaying a page "incorrectly". However since IE is so popular, web designers always make sure they're web pages look perfect (according to their intentions) in Internet Explorer first and then try to fix up things for other browsers as possible. So although IE may be displaying the page "incorrectly" it is more likely to be showing the page the way the designer intended it to look.

To add insult to injury, IE version 6 fixed some display bugs that were in version 5. Because of that, some pages that had "fixes" in place to work around those display bugs no longer display properly in version 6. To accomodate that, there is actually an HTML command that a web designer can use, can incorporate at the top of his page, that tells IE 6 to go into a mode where it intentionally reproduces the errors that existed in version 5. HA! It is actually called "quirks mode" and the command (tag) has the word "quirksmode" right in it. The command tells the browser to intentionally misbehave so that the page will look right after fixing the errors.

Seems like a mess, no? In some ways it is... but for the most part the web really works very well.

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--http://www.idexter.com