[ITlocal]

Hi,
How does everyone test their sites compatibility with various browsers? I don't have a mac but would like to test it safari...
Any ideas? Virtual server or similar maybe?

[Dizi]

http://browsershots.org/ <--- great site for testing, although it can take a while to get the screen shots depending on how busy the site its

[Rachael]

I have a small team of pixies who test stuff for me.

Actually, half the time I have confidence in my markup for it to just 'work', and the other half I bribe Mac-using friends of mine to let me know if there are problems.

[Mesa]

I work in FF3 and regularly test in IE6 and IE7 and use that browser shots every so often to check the other big boys.

[ITlocal]

Thanks guys, screen shots are fine but what about testing more complex things...
For instance my mate just emailed to tell me he cannot post on http://www.theiveyle...co.uk/gbook.php using his imac. Problem is I have no way to test it and to see what the problem is, any ideas...

[Mesa]

Nearly always cross browser because they render things differently. PHP is ran on the server.

[BrowserBugs]

ITlocal, on Aug 27 2008, 11:19, said:

Hi,
How does everyone test their sites compatibility with various browsers? I don't have a mac but would like to test it safari...
Any ideas? Virtual server or similar maybe?

The method I find works (well started being picky about two months ago) is to ensure you validate to W3C.org standards to start with. I have since tested some sites that conform on my mates mac in safari and as far as i'm aware it's pretty much the same as FF.

I've recently hit an IE7 issue, not with IE7 itself, rather one machine that refuses to obay! But that's another story.

I hope this helps ...

BB

[Matthew]

I've often heard that it's good practice to design sites that work first, then go and hack stuff around where necessary to get over the issues of particular browsers. I tend to develop with Firefox, then check with IE7, then with IE6, putting in work-arounds as and where needed. Those are the three main browsers, so those are the ones to focus on primarily. Opera and Safari can have their own idiosyncrasies, so it's worth testing in those if you can, but if not then you're only going to upset a very small minority of people who use those browsers exclusively.

Technically I have access to a lot of browsers, though I rarely make use of all of them. I'm a Mac user primarily, so I use FF3, Safari and Opera for testing here. Then I've got a PC with XP on it equipped with IE7, IE6, Firefox 3 and Safari. The PC also dual-boots into Ubuntu so I can test on the Linux browsers - FF3 again, Opera, Konqueror. I suppose I ought to have a copy of FF2 around somewhere too, just in case, but to be honest FF2 was always better than IE7 anyway!

[BlueIce]

Dizi, on Aug 27 2008, 11:21, said:

http://browsershots.org/ <--- great site for testing, although it can take a while to get the screen shots depending on how busy the site its

Agree, great site that I have used in the past.