Chrome and Firefox are correct. Width is not a valid style property for inline elements. You have several options:
Inline Blocks
You can do this:
<span>fig</span>vitamin<br>
<span>apple</span>vitamin<br>
<span>coconut</span>vitamin
with:
span { display: inline-block; width: 80px; }
You ll notice I used <span> instead of <div>. There is a reason for this. <span>s are naturally display: inline and according to Quirksmode:
In IE 6 and 7 inline-block works
only on elements that have a natural
display: inline.
Firefox 2 and lower don t support this
value. You can use -moz-inline-box,
but be aware that it s not the same as
inline-block, and it may not work as
you expect in some situations.
Floats
You can float the left labels:
<div>fig</div>vitamin<br>
<div>apple</div>vitamin<br>
<div>coconut</div>vitamin
with:
div { float: left; clear: left; width: 80px; }
If the text after the <div> is sufficiently large it will wrap to the beginning of the line (not with the 80px buffer). You might want that or not.
Definition List
Using this markup:
<dl>
<dt>fig</dt><dd>vitamin</dd>
<dt>apple</dt><dd>vitamin</dd>
<dt>coconut</dt><dd>vitamin</dd>
</dl>
with:
dt { float: left; width: 80px; }
Tables
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="left">fig</td>
<td>vitamin</td>
</tr>
<td>apple</td>
<td>vitamin</td>
</tr>
<td>coconut</td>
<td>vitamin</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
with:
table { border-collapse: collapse; }
td.left { width: 80px; }
Tables will be by far the most backward compatible solution (going back to IE5 or earlier) so they re still often used in situations where some might argue they aren t appropriate. The ideals of the so-called semantic Web are well-intentioned and worth adhering to where possible but you ll also often end up in situations where you re choosing between "semantic purity" and backwards compatibility so a certain amount of pragmatism needs to prevail.
That being said, unless you re not telling us something, you shouldn t need to go this path if you don t want to.
Lastly, always put a DOCTYPE declaration on your pages. It forces IE from quirks mode to standards compliant mode (both euphemisms). For example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
...
