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CSS CSS Basics (2014) Getting Started with CSS Inline and Internal Styles

Noah Fields
Noah Fields
13,985 Points

Are there minor differences between different the default styles of different browsers?

This video notes that, by default, each browser has a different "user sheet", or something similar to that, which gives it a default amount of styling even when no CSS is present. It is stated that on each browser, it should look "exactly the same". However, I noticed that, even after making a few of the basic CSS edits in this video, my page looks very slightly different. The next seems a tiny bit smaller and the bolded font on my version looks a bit different - the thickness of each letter looks a bit different. However, I also know that the web browser I use, Comodo IceDragon, is assuredly not the one used in the video (which I think is Chrome). Is the use of a different browser creating very slight, still present, differences in the way the text is shown? Alternatively, is it possible that my browser's window size is different from his (I have mine pretty small at the moment) and that this is what causes the differences?

1 Answer

Hi there,

The short answer is yes - different browsers do render things slightly differently. What you'll generally see is subtle changes in things like default text styling and padding. The way a lot of people get around this is by using a reset stylesheet - something like normalize.css.

A reset stylesheet basically attempts to undo the browser's default styling and puts all of the browsers on a more even playing field, leaving you to write your own CSS file to load over it. This helps to get more consistent styles across browsers - you'll probably encounter references to these types of stylesheets in your courses, if you haven't already.