Why does Java paint different under different Mac browsers?

I understand there are differences between Java on a PC vs. Mac vs. Linux. We have code in place to check for each. Even some code for OS subsets such as some special code for Win7 and Vista vs. older Windows flavors. They added fancy pants painting to the combobox in Vista so my custom control paint needed to reflect those changes.

What gets me is I can run our applet on my PC under Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari or Opera and it looks the same. All the colors match, buttons look identical, my custom controls paint exactly the same. I can see no differences.

Today I get a few bugs about things not painting correctly on the Mac. No big deal, I grab the development team's laptop, update the OS, update Java and install latest versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Run Chrome as my testbed and fix the items reported by QA. Just an hour or so of pretty easy work. Then I decided to run the software to see if I spotted any new issues and I found some with toolbar button painting. I resolved those under Chrome then ran it in Safari. Background is a lot darker over the main toolbar but buttons are readable. Then I run it under Firefox and when you have a toggle button on the toolbar you can not tell which button is toggled. It gets a special outline and color in Chrome, Safari and Opera just not Firefox.

Safari on Mac

Firefox on Mac

The three right most green buttons are a toggle group, only one will be selected. They are fit to screen, fit to width and fit to height. On Safari you can clearly tell you are in fit to screen mode. Under Firefox you have no idea.

According to the Java console window that pops up as I run Java in each browser I am running JDK 1.6 update 20 in each one. I am not using any special paint code for this button, just using standard JToggleButton. I did not touch code in this area for my other bug fixes. I run an older version of our applet and it still looks bad in Firefox. Why does the JToggleButton paint differently in a JToolBar between browsers? Why is the browser controlling the background color of the toolbar in some cases? This is not how WORA is supposed to work. Of course I know WORA does not work between OS vendors or versions but I did not expect the browser to mess me up.

My other Mac bug was about things painting outside the custom control. On the PC in Java if you set a clip region outside the control you are currently painting it still gets auto clipped to your control. It was a simple fix, I just did an intersection between the current clip and the rectangle I was about to paint thus if it was out of bounds on the Mac I did not paint where I should not be painting. No Mac check, worked fine on PC with the intersection check. I did add a comment as to why the clipping is there and really it is the most legal way to handle things but it was the Mac that forced the work back on the developer, not saying the Mac was wrong, just the PC Java was friendlier.

We need to test more often on the Mac. It is an important platform. We have clients using it. Stinks that I have to dig down this deep to fix things and now I have a new problem between browsers that I am not sure how to even fix. Has anyone else run into the JToggleButton paint issue?