A web browser is software that allows you to access websites.
In your journey into becoming a web developer it's important to know the tools you'll be using intimately. One such is the browser, which will be used to display your websites. In the following resources you'll learn about the many parts any web browser consists of and what their use is:
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A website, ultimately is a set of instructions describing how a series of webpages should look. It's up to the browser to render it by reading the code from your HTML/CSS and JavaScript files. There are, however, differences in the code interpretation of the different browsers, thus making the output look differently.
That's why you should check the way your website looks on different browsers during the development of your website. This is called making it cross browser compatible>
You can use the following online tool in order see how your pages look on multiple browsers:
A good website should look and function the same in any browser.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for that. You should check the specificities of each browser that fails to display your website correctly and make the necessary adjustments to your code. Such compatibility issues may occur not only in different browsers but because of an old browser version which does not support completely the latest standards.
This is because browser development doesn't go at the same speed as programming language development. More often than not, the web technologies you're using will have more features you as a developer can make use of than the browser can currently handle. This is important to keep in mind.
When you do your styling, especially, it's important to know if a certain browser (and browser version) is even able to understand it. A helpful tool in identifying this is a website called caniuse.com:
Generally speaking, you want to support as many browsers (and browser versions) with your code as possible.
If you just can't get enough, here are some extra links that mentors/students have found useful concerning this topic: