Testing Your Design in Multiple Browsers
The Internet is truly miraculous. By defining a standard collection of tags and specifying how each should behave, the community ensured that all third-party browsers would render a web site exactly the same. Um… yeah.
I’ll go along with the part about the Internet being miraculous, but browsers rendering web sites the same? There isn’t even a universal consensus on HTML tags and their attributes. Don’t even think about Javascript or CSS. (Yes, IE6, I’m looking at you.)
What’s the answer? You could just throw blinking red text at the top of your site that reads, “This site is best viewed in MyFavoriteBrowser. Download it now!” Well, unless your product or service is directly related to a particular browser, this reeks of incompetence. It looks like you don’t have the chops to design a site that will operate correctly in all the major modern browsers.
So you know you need cross-browser functionality. Now what? If all you had to do were install all the versions of all the browsers in popular use on your machine, it would be annoying enough. Unfortunately it isn’t even that easy. You may not be able to install every popular version of a browser on your machine. If you attempt to download the latest version of a browser, it may overwrite the previous version. (IE, you seem to be drawing a lot of criticism today.) Great for non-tech-savvy users, bad for web designers.
Ready for another curve ball? The same browser may behave differently based on the operating system you’re using. Am I saying Firefox 1.5 on a PC may behave differently than Firefox 1.5 on a Mac? Indeed I am.
So what we’ve determined is you need one computer for every combination of operating system and browser version. It’s not (quite) that bad. Different browsers don’t conflict with each other, so you can download the latest version of IE, Firefox, Netscape, Opera, and any other browser you want on the same machine. Add in the fact that not every browser requires a separate machine for each version, and you’ve cut down on the number significantly. Unfortunately, for most of us six or seven extra computers just to test browser compatibility is an expensive proposition.
If that seems like a lot of hardware, there are software solutions available. You can set up multiple partitions on your machine and create a dual-boot configuration. Hmm. It isn’t terribly convenient to reboot your machine each time you switch back and forth between browsers.
A better solution is to set up emulators on your machine. Emulators more or less allow you to run a different operating system as an application on your current machine. In practice it’s similar to remotely connecting to another machine, a machine that happens to live on a small piece of your hard drive. The biggest downside to emulators is that they can be very slow, although certainly faster than rebooting your machine. You can find quite a few free pc emulators and free mac emulators at thefreecountry.com
Looking for a solution with a little more hop in its step? Browsercam offers screen captures of a wide selection of browsers on the most popular operating systems currently in use. If you need to test your Javascript, purchase remote access sessions to their bank of machines. Browsercam is not free, but the price is reasonable for the service they provide. You can also try the free screen capture service at Browsershots.org, but if the queue for a particular browser is too long, the service will block you. Everytime I’ve visited, all but one browser is unavailable.
