OK....I should know this but up until now I've just been mozying along with IE. I had one member tell me today that my homepage has overlapping items for him - it does not for me. He has a MAC with Safari. On my homepage, I have a table towards the top. It comes down farther on the page than the "right boxes". It does not wrap wider under the boxes. I made the margins shorter so that the top part would not overlap. Is there a different way I should have done this?

I am also wondering now about how it looks in Firefox.

If I want to test in both IE and Firefox, where do I begin? Do I download Firefox and install but keep IE as my default browser? I also want to keep Outlook Express as the default. I presume that if I did this, I'd just launch FF when I wanted to test with it? Not sure there is any way for me to test with Mac/Safari.

I am only hesitant because I don't want to really mess up my system. Any and all advice is welcomed.

Site looks fine in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. I'm going to guess that this person has some type of magnification or oversized fonts turned on, or something like that. If you want to see how your site looks in all web browsers just go to browsershots.org, it's a pretty amazing tool.

Yes, if you want to download Firefox simply do that and keep Internet Explorer as your primary browser. You can download all 4 major browswers, IE, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. Yes, Safari has a PC version not just a Mac version.

Your browser will have nothing to do with Outlook Express and downloading and installing any browser should not interfere with your email settings at all.

OK...so I installed Firefox 3.5 and I am looking around. A few more questions for you.

• I previously had the Missing Owners (Classmates) box showing on the homepage. In Firefox it looks fine but in IE, my "yellow box" message overlaps into the Missing Owners box. This was the same symptom with my Safari guy. I temporarily removed the Missing Owners last night so you didn't see this when you looked in Safari.
• My QUESTION FROM OWNER box is a different size in each browser. IE is wider.
• This one is puzzling. When editing, on text sizes - in Firefox I see all of the choices from SS Small - XX Large. In IE, I can only see Smaller, Larger, XX Small, X Small and Small. Same thing if I am right clicking on something selected inside a table, for example....I cannot see the full list of options. I only see down as far as COLUMN. Same thing when trying to edit colors. In Firefox I see the full palette. In IE I only see part way into the 7th box going right and part way through the last row of colors. Do not see the More Colors option. IE has been this way all along and I've been working around it as best as possible.

Can you help me?

P.S. I tried the browsershots yesterday afternoon. Problem is, you can't see the full page and the items I wanted to check for (Where They Live Box and Missing Owners Box) don't appear unless you are signed in so I couldn't tell the placements and the overlapping issue.

1) Looks like you deactivated Missing Owners again, but I briefly toggled it back on and I do see the problem. The problem is that table starts in the left column before the right column ends. That means you can only use a table width that fits. If you force the table wider than the maximum available room, which you're doing by putting in a table width of 607, then you're going to have this problem in Internet Explorer. There are two things you can do:

a) Remove the 607 from the table width and leave the width blank. This will allow the table to fill all available room, but not exceed the available room.

b) In the source code at the very top of your home page (the very first line) insert this code:

This will cause your home page content to always begin after the conclusion of the last right hand module and you'll never have an overlap problem. In Internet Explorer the one possible undesirable effect of doing this is you'll have some blank white space on your page before your home page content begins. You can fill this blank white space if desired by adding more content to the Annoucements area above it.

Yes, the box is wider in Firefox because Firefox automatically bumps your content down to where it will fit instead of overlapping it like Internet Explorer does. Thus in Firefox you're using the full available space. The command I just gave you above will cause Internet Explorer to behave exactly like Firefox and the width of the box will be the same in both browsers.

Regarding text sizes etc., I cannot reproduce what you are describing between the two browsers. Make sure you are running the latest version of Internet Explorer, which is IE8. Make sure that the default fonts in your own IE browser are set to medium. Make sure that IE or any plugin is not magnifying the default size of your browser display. My hunch is you've got one of these settings set to something non standard and as a result you're seeing the truncated options. I would think the menu would still be scrollable to see all available options no matter what you do, but since I can't reproduce the problem I'm only guessing.

Thanks again for your usual fine help. I removed the width. I didn't put the first line in because I didn't want all that white space. Wanted my content to start right at the top.

Re the text issue.....I had been running IE7. Was hesitant to install IE8 when it first came out a/c buggy. Never got around to it. Installed it tonight and voila! My other issues are now gone.

You're always right there with great help!