That is an interesting observation. I would not have expected that, either.
When I'm designing a website, I'll use Adobe Browser Lab, bowsershots.org, or another system to test a site in various browsers and various versions of those browsers.
Now that Netscape's not in the picture, headaches are primarily confined to IE (and let's not even talk about IE6), the browser that doesn't think it has to play by the rules ("I'm getting better," in Monty Python parlance, IE says). Although there are Mozilla-specific CSS rules for @font-faces and rounded corners, etc.
I was using Safari Version 5.1.2 (6534.52.7) on OS X Version 10.6.8 (Firefox runs slow, and Chrome is just too streamlined some of the time; Opera's okay), and it simply doesn't show tables correctly. I kick among four browsers depending on what I'm doing. The table widths show fine in everything except Safari.
Odd. As I said, I was taking a table refresher because tables were replaced by the
Thank you for all of your help. I'm posting this reply in Firefox.