Why do Google and Twitter use table layout? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Table layout is working on most browsers. Google and others want to reach all user, not some or only modern users. Having different layouts or layout technologies is hard to maintain and costly in delivering content. Table layout is not tricky. Its straight forward. You dont have to look for css hacks, browser incompatibilities or others.

Table layouts are bad. Because thy mix layout and content.

Answer 2

Table layout gets more grief than it deserves. It's easy for developers to use, it's consistent across nearly every web browser, and it allows you to easily add rows/columns with little to no effort.

The only downside is that it goes against the mantra that your document should only contain content, and your design should be contained separately (in a CSS file).

Answer 3

Browser Support - These guys need to have their websites render perfectly on ALL web browsers (New, Old and Obscure). No matter who's using their websites and what OS/Browser their using, these websites need to work.

Each web browser supports it's own implementation of CSS and this causes a similar issue to that of the JavaScript DOM support in various browsers.

Page Load Time - Also their pages are optimized for Page load times. If it takes a user too long to load the page they'll just go somewhere else. There are still plenty of users without broadband, even a lot of mobile devices don't have very fast connections depending on where you are.