eli5 Why do some websites work on specific browsers? For example Chrome and not Firefox.
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Consider that how a particular web page looks in a particular browser is a matter of interpretation.
For example, if you have a desk then you could interpret it as being 1.2m wide, 0.5m deep and 0.7m tall. If you were to ask someone to make you a desk and provided those values, without the specific metric, to someone that works using the metric system then their interpretation will be in line with what it’s supposed to be. If you were to give those same values to someone who uses the imperial system then what you get won’t be quite the same.
This is analogous to how sites appear differently in different browsers. There’s an organisation that defines how something should work (W3C) which releases specifications. Different browsers use different rendering engines. Some browsers use the same engines and so they will render things the same between them. When a rendering engine interprets a specification differently than some other rendering engine that’s because one or both of them have failed to implement the specification correctly.
In some cases it’s possible for the developers of the site to supply targeted instructions to misbehaving rendering engines to trick them into rendering correctly. For this reason some sites may appear to be more consistent than other sites. At that point it becomes an economic decision based on how popular a given site is vs how much time it will take to implement these workarounds.
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