How Much Of An Effect Can Different Operating Systems Have On Displaying Web Pages?

I've seen a lot of users on this site provide operating system specs when describing web development bugs and I've seen a few instances of things working on one OS but not another.

Solution 1:

That all depends on the browser manufacturer, but in my experience they are pretty close to the same cross platform, aside from some UI stuff. Ubuntu is probably the OS they pay the least attention to and Firefox for instance works exactly the same on Windows and Ubuntu.

Web Development in terms of the operating system your server is running is an issue and is not cross platform when it comes to interacting with the file system, but that's not really your question.

Solution 2:

10 years ago, this answer would have been a resounding yes. For instance, IE5 on the Mac was a very different code base than on Windows, and rendered things quite a bit different. But, with modern browsers this is generally not so much the case.

There are still some minor differences. For instance, safari on the Mac (not sure about FF) renders with mac-styled controls, which can have different sizes, borders, font-sizes, etc.. This can cause subtle rendering problems between platforms, but generally not anything to worry about unless a single pixel can mess up your design.

Fonts are another issue, because different fonts exist on different systems, and they have different metrics.

Javascript rendering can be an issue between browsers, but not usually the same version on different OS's.

The latest fad is hardware acceleration, which can be different between OS's, but should generally just result in speed of rendering differences..