Do different browsers render decimal percentage sizes differently?

Question

When setting widths of elements with CSS, I often end up wanting to set percentage widths that aren't whole percentages.

Do all (which I doubt) browsers handle decimal percentages in the same way, or do they render differently?

Can I accurately use it for layouts?

Answer 1

Webkit browsers handle sub-pixel rounding very differently than other browsers. So much so that it's considered an ongoing issue. Meanwhile, Firefox and Opera seem to be able to handle sub-pixel rendering just fine; I haven't heard of many issues.

IE is another story entirely.

Here are some links for more about this topic:

• Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS
• Percentage Bugs in Webkit

I asked a question similar to this a little while back. This is what I've been able to gather since then (from both the accepted answer and elsewhere).

Answer 2

Yes they do.

From my memory:

In Opera, you cannot set the decimal places of the percentage so, if you set 33.3% it uses only 33% (rather annoying) (edit:Opera may have improved on that in current version as it seems)

In Firefox, if you have percentages that add up to 100%, the pixels don't always add up to the 100% of the pixels
e.g. you have a outer div with three columns all with width: 33.33333%. If the outer div has width 100px, the columns will have 33 pixels and the sum is 99 pixels and not 100. (edit: Firefox does better than I remember. Maybe they improved)

Old IE, I cannot remember IE9 seems to work fine. The bad one of course is IE7, which rounds up (as the IE6, but who cares?). IE8/9 seem to work ok

Chrome works fine

Safari: can't remember

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edit

Her one can test for oneself
http://jsfiddle.net/fTpFw/

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conclusion

After I played with my fiddle in different browsers I think they all have improved. The only bad implementations (from what I want to achieve) in modern browsers is Opera and Safari. IE7 is a stopper, too. If you don't have to deal with these buggers, you could go ahead and use the percentage widths.