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By ijoselito | May 9, 2008
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We’ll talk more about these guidelines in the future but I would like to talk about cross browsing testing and the challenges that it presents.
For a small team of developers like us cross browsing testing can be troublesome because not all the platforms/browsers are available to us. We use our own equipment for developing and testing, so not always there is an old Pentium II machine with IE4 installed for testing purposes.
Luckily our team is well balance and we have users for the three main operating systems Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. Now with the arrival of Vista we have a new operating system to test and honestly after trying it up none of us is excited with the prospect of installing Vista in a (otherwise) productive machine. Microsoft is currently the biggest problem that web designers/developers face.
Their Internet Explorer policy is continuously changing in the last 5 years so they have gone from completely different from every other browser (and W3C standards) to just partially different them but half way supporting standards.
Internet Explorer 7 has brought a new set of inconveniences. Now if a user installs IE7 in his machine, inevitably IE6 will stop working. There are several methods that allow the users install both, but nevertheless it’s still a problem to ensure that new websites can be displayed properly in IE6.
Internet Explorer 6 is the most annoying thing in the web world, full of bugs, it would display the content of websites in its own very peculiar way, which forces the developers to create hacks and other alternatives if they want to achieve a decent grade of usability.
I am currently using a website to test how our websites look in other operating systems and different browsers. The website is called browsershots.org and it provides a very simple yet powerful functionality, it creates a screenshot of your website displayed in any(almost every) browser under any (almost every) operating system. The images take a little bit to be created so if you test your website under 44 different browsers it can take a while before all the images are uploaded, but it’s worth a try. A very useful tool for developers.
We will be talking more about this issues and about what can we do as community to improve our user’s experience.
Thanks.
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