A note on backgrounds. Don't make backgrounds that hurt peoples eyes, are 2 meg jpegs, or just mess things up in general. Backgrounds should be interesting, but should not render the text unreadable. A rule of thumb is to have a background which is just one color or an image without much color variation. One idea would be to emboss what you wanted to use as a background and then play with the color balance to give it the color you want.
Backgrounds are actually an extremely tough issue in web page design.
As far as browsers go, there are many possibilities. KDE also has a pretty nice one. Notice that in all of these there are no readability problems, no nuisances on the screen, terseness, etc. Always keep the basic rules in your head. Remember that you want people coming to your page.