What browsers/platforms do you test on?

Hello all -

Very first post in the forum - oh the pressure!

Let’s kick this off with a general discussion of what browsers are worth testing on. I always seem to be in a rush, and so I’ve started testing my designs on fewer and fewer browsers over time. I wonder if others are doing the same, or if I’m missing something important.

As a rule, I check new designs only on the following setups:

• IE6 and 7 - Windows XP PC
• Firefox 1.5 and 2 - Windows XP PC
• Safari (latest) - Mac OSX
• Firefox (latest) - Mac OSX

Sometimes I check things on Opera, but I never bother with IE5, Linux, or pretty much anything else. And I actually don’t have a Mac, so I have to go to a friend’s house to test on that. Which means that I don’t do it quite as thoroughly as I do on the PC...

The only major issues that I’ve had this year (other than adjusting a lot of stylesheets for IE7’s new behavior) have been related to MSN Explorer (which caches pages - badly - and thus doesn’t update when say a product is put into a shopping basket) and AOL OpenRide (which seems to freak out with modal JavaScripts).

Am I cutting any important corners here? What do other folks do? These setups should cover the vast majority of users, so I haven’t had too many problems so far.

Perhaps one way that we could make good use of this forum is to help each other out by testing out designs on the platforms that we each have available.

FF 2.0 and Safari on OS X; I develop on a MAMP server installation. I also have a VirtualPC with IE 6. I try to keep things simple with a minimum of "hacks". So far I haven’t had any complaints.

That brings up a related question as to the advantages of testing on a local server as compared to on the actual destination (remote) server. I used to test locally (using Apache) but more than once I had issues when transferring to the actual host server, and it always seemed like more work to me. But now of course I’m often frustrated by file upload times, and since I’m in southern Mexico my connection goes down all too often and stops me from working at all.

You may want to test out some of your designs on IE7, Susan. There are a couple of fairly major changes in the way that it handles CSS rules, and I found that they broke the majority of my previous designs (mostly the fact that IE7 will not expand a container with a set height or width if the contents are larger than that; you need to use min-height and min-width instead). Overall it’s much closer to web standards though, and it actually supports transparent PNGs!

EDIT: I forgot to say that if you’d like me to send you screenshots of any of your designs in IE7 just PM me the details...

I only test with Netscape 4.7. Why bother building with all those CSS hacks and stuff when a simple table-based layout will do. Heh heh!

I pretty much test everything with Firefox first (Windows, OS X, and Linux versions). After that, I’ll test with IE6 and IE7 followed by Safari. Most of the time if everything works and looks good then Opera, Konquer, and other browsers usually will work. There are exceptions but, as Susan said, if you keep it simple with minimal hacks then most of the quirks don’t appear all too often. Most of the time, when it comes to browser compatibility, I let the server logs tell me what I need to know.

Jeff

Quote from: Bravado at Dec 15, 2006, 05:19 PM

Most of the time, when it comes to browser compatibility, I let the server logs tell me what I need to know.

It pains me, but I couldn’t agree more. I think we can all recall a time or two when the "perfect" design broke in the most popular browser, so we edit, tone down, de-coolify until it looks acceptable for the majority of (preferably all) browsers, and take one for the proverbial team.

-sD-
Dr. Scotty Delicious, Scientist.

Primary focus on IE6, 5.5, and maybe 5 (need to add 7 to that list now), latest couple versions of FF, latest version of Safari, and occasionally Opera... but much of it depends on the target audience as far as how much I let any issues be a driving force. Opera’s use in the States is very minimal, so if there is a minor issue there and I expect the majority of traffic to be local, trying to fix that minor issue could make bigger issues somewhere else.

At the very least, I like to at least get Browsercam shots of 2-3 pages in most of the current (past 2 versions) of browsers.

I actually think the treatment of eliminating CSS hacks and html conditionals is completely wrong. Why aren’t there conditionals in CSS.... because. Not a real good answer in my mind.

So now let’s try to eliminate the CSS hacks, but in place of that, you can add conditionals to all of your html pages and have different stylesheets for different browsers. Okay, so now, rather than adjusting and keeping one file, you have to adjust every page (granted, MODx or other system makes this easier than a purely static site) and keep multiple stylesheets in sync.

Quote from: ZAP at Dec 15, 2006, 03:19 PM

You may want to test out some of your designs on IE7, Susan.

VirtualPC with Windows 2000. Can’t do IE 7. I’m drooling over a 15" Panasonic ToughBook, though, and if I do go for it sometime next year it will have Vista by then. And within an hour will be dual-booted with Linux.

Hi all,

• FF 1.5.0.7 Linux
• Opera 9.02 Linux
• IE7 XP
• FF 2.0 XP
• Netscape 8 XP
• Opera 9.02 XP

I always design on my very old Linux box that at this time runs on PCLinuxOS/Apache/Mysql/PHP. It only has 220MB memory and a 400MHz processor. If I can design a layout on it that loads fast it is usually super fast on everything else.

I use FF 1.5.07 to get things lined up and be aware of load times. I try to use as many percentage boxes as I can. I have found that using percentage based layouts speeds up the process and will normally look the same in Opera 9.02 and Netscape8.

After the basic layout is done I will upload to server and (used to test with IE6) test with IE7 on Windows XP. This is when the headache and cursing starts, especially with IE6. Even the simplest layouts usually break in IE6. Then it is time for the tweaks. I’ll try to find the "happy medium" for all the browsers. Then I double check on FF 2.0, Opera 9.02 and Netscape8(sometimes) on the XP box to make sure everything is the same.

I work with FF 1.5 for Win xp (soon to be changed to FF 2.0). When I’m happy with my site in FF, I start looking at other browsers. First I optimize for IE 6 and 7 (pc), using conditional comments if necessary. I use Browsercam to check how Safari and FF Mac are behaving - that’s generally ok. The same goes for FF and Konqueror for Linux.
Usually I don’t bother with Explorer versions lower than 6. I do check with Lynx, though. It’s good to know how your site is working in a text-only environment.

Quote from: Maaike at Dec 16, 2006, 11:32 AM

I do check with Lynx, though. It’s good to know how your site is working in a text-only environment.

That’s a very good point. I should probably be doing that also. I know that I’m going to start getting complaints sooner or later about how my eCard scripts don’t load properly on a Nokia.