ok I have the following browsers installed on my systems.

• Firefox (defualt on my xp machine)
  
• Safari(Default on macs + beta on xp machine)
  
• Opera
  
• IE
  

Is there any other browsers i should use or do these pritty much cover every one ?

Harmony has just wrote a something on this forum that could help you

 

http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/index.ph...ic=1552&hl=

I'm new to this, browser hacks and conditonal comments thanks though i have book marked that article so I can back to it in a feww weeks/months.

Netscape, Maxathon?

Just remember that there is a big difference between how a site looks in IE6 and IE7 so always try to test it on both if you can. I'm sure you will find the article of some use once you start to get your head around the coding part

Just remember that there is a big difference between how a site looks in IE6 and IE7 so always try to test it on both if you can. I'm sure you will find the article of some use once you start to get your head around the coding part

 

Agreed, your going to need both 6 & 7 versions of IE and the rest you mentioned, there are others, but they are in such a minority that it's not a major neccesaity to design for, but it's totally your call if I had to suggest another one it would be Netscape.

 

2 really useful Firefox extensions to use, which will make debugging your code easier are:

 

1. Firebug

2. Web Developer toolbar

 

Regards

Netscape, Maxathon?

 

Maxathon uses IE to render the pages. It's just wrapped up differently.

 

In reality it's more about Rendering Engines than Browsers.

 

You got IE, Mozilla, Opera and Webkit which is the major rendeing engines. Basicly any browser out there uses one of them.

Personallly, I build it for IE (still the worlds most popular ) Then it migrates pretty easy to IE7 and firefox, sometimes you can even use only 1 stylesheet

Well if we talk personally, I always work with IE6 and Firefox while building the site, as I find if you can get it to look right in both of them chances are it will work fine in all the other browsers. I will then check it works in other browsers when I have the structure finished, then if I need to (which isn't that often) I will make the changes needed.

You have the most common ones already downloaded there really arent any other ones i can think of.

At work we usually develop for Firefox equipped with the Web Developer toolbar & Firebug, mainly as it follows the W3C standards a bit more closely than IE and that the minority browsers (eg. Konqueror) are more likely to render to standards than follow Microsoft's. Then I'll usually see what oddities crop up between the browsers and hack away until most of them are ironed out. If there's anything that IE really struggles with, I'll use conditional comments.

 

I'll usually test in the latest copy of Firefox, a copy of Opera above 9.x, IE6/7 and to check the document structure... good old Lynx

 

I also use browsershots.org to test out the appearance of the site in the minority browsers and older versions of FF. I also try and test in as many versions of IE as I can.