[ubuntu-uk] website appearance with ubuntu and firefox

[alan c]

I was using a website, using firefox browser, recently and found that
the display gave a text overlap of a field I wanted to use, which
caused difficulty. I informed the site author and the matter is now
awaiting correction.

However, when I was in discussion with the site author there was the
suggestion that it was related to point sizes or font sizes or
similar, and it seems this item is not a problem when firefox was used
with windows, only with ubuntu. I am not using windows so I cannot
check this.

When I did look again knowing this, I saw that my Ubuntu 8.04.3 had
firefox 3.0.15 and my Ubuntu 9.10 had firefox 3.5.5  which was not
(quite) so bad, but still not displaying correctly.

How is it that different OSs cause say, firefox, to display stuff
differently? and given that this happens, is it difficult to try to
use the same parameters in ubuntu as windows, or is there something
fundamental causing a difficulty?

My particular difficulty was with the newsletter registration fields
on the right hand side of the page:
http://www.hattonmarketing.co.uk/

Comments appreciated
-- 
alan cocks
Ubuntu user