Website looking fine in Chrome and Safari but terribly broken in Internet Explorer and Firefox? Check your stylesheet for errors.

Recently a client contacted us with a problem on a personal WordPress blog.

The issue was that the blog looked fine on Chrome and Safari but on Internet Explorer (ver.11) and Firefox (ver.27), the blog looked terrible.

In fact the site looked almost as if there was no stylesheet applied to the site.

Checking out the stylesheet by first source-formatting the css file using Dreamweaver and then looking at the style declarations revealed some stray curly brackets.

Removing the stray curly brackets immediately solved the problem.

As it turns out, Chrome is very forgiving and intelligent about stray characters in style sheets. So if you see that a site looks absolutely terrible on one browser and not others, the first order of business would be to checkout the style sheets.

Firefox and Internet Explorer are not.