Can the HTTP version or headers affect the visual appearance of a web page?

Question

I know, I would have thought the answer was obviously "no" as well, but I am experiencing a strange situation where when I view my site from our staging server it appears slightly larger than when I view it from my local dev server. I have used Charles to confirm that all of the content -- the HTML, the images, the CSS, the javascript, everything is the same.

The ONLY difference in the traffic is that (because the local site is served from the Django development mode server) the response headers look like this:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server  WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.5.2
Date    Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:56:10 GMT 
Vary    Cookie
Content-Length  2301
Content-Type    text/html; charset=utf-8

Whereas on the staging server (where Django is running inside Apache) the headers look like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date    Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:56:06 GMT
Server  Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2 PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5 with Suhosin-Patch
Vary    Cookie
Content-Length  2301
Content-Type    text/html; charset=utf-8

So, as far as I can tell the only differences are HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/1.0, the server identifer (Apache vs WSGIServer) and the order of the Date/Server headers.

To elaborate a bit further on the differences in appearance, basically it appears as if the version of the site on the staging server is "zoomed in" by about 10%. For example, the primary logo which dominates our home page is 220 pixels wide but when server from our staging server shows up as 245 pixels wide. Everything else on the page, (other images, text, spacing, etc) is also proportionately larger.

This is all in Firefox 3. I don't have any other browsers available to test with at the moment.

Has anyone else encountered any bizarre behavior anything like this before? I am at a loss.

Answer 1

Have you tried View -> Zoom -> Reset on both sites?