What is the correct font?

Hi,
I’ve been studying japanese kanji for some months, and I realize from time to time that my mnemonics (‘Remembering the kanji’) are messed up. Depending on if I study my list in excel or read online in Google Chrome, many kanji shapes change . For instance, the kanji for age (齢) or the one for thread (糸) dont look the same on chrome versus excel, or firefox for that matter. Could you tell me if this is a problem with chrome, or is this just a fact that kanji can take many forms? If the latter is true, It makes the ‘remember the kanji’ kind of difficult to apply strictly. It becomes dubious to learn a mnemonic that rely on every stroke perfectly, which is what the the book tends to do.

Are you familiar with the Wiki list of jōyō kanji?

It attempts to explain the difference between Kyūjitai (“old” Kanji characters) and Shinjitai (“new” Kanji charachters). It lists 2136 “new” (Shinjitai) characters, including 糸 (thread) and 齢 (age), and the next column identifies about 365 “old” (Kyūjitai) characters, 絲 (thread) and 齡 (age) among them. Also, if you select a character which takes you to the Wiktionary, the stroke order is animated for many of the characters.

As far as differences between platforms, I have no idea; however, I did observe that the new and old characters for ‘thread,’ here on this page on LingQ, appeared different to me (just as they are in Wikipedia), both as I was typing and after I posted this reply. (I am using Firefox on — don’t laugh — Windows XP.)

But the new and old characters for ‘age,’ here on this page in LingQ, appeared identical to me as I was typing this reply, even though the characters appeared different (just as they are in Wikipedia) when I copied each of them directly from this page into WordPad as I was typing. And they appeared different (just as they are in Wikipedia) after I posted this reply .

Which tells me that, yes, aside from differences between “old” and “new” Kanji characters, there are also differences between how they appear on different platforms.

Thank you,
I went to check for the kanji ‘age’ ( 齢 - Wiktionary )
On the right, the 3 representations are displayed: the ‘shinjitai’, the ‘simplified’, and the ‘traditional’. I was not aware of those, but from what I understand, the shinjitai is the ‘Simplified form of Japanese kanji used after 1947’, whereas the one labeled ‘simplified’ is the chinese version. So that answers my question: the one my Excel/Firefox are showing is the Japanese shinjitai version, and the one chrome is showing is the Chinese simplified version (which curiously does not correspond to the old version showed in the joyo list. ) I should maybe check to see if that can be changed in chrome.

thank you for your help!