The last few days I have spent fixing web browser compatibility issues for both our company website and this blog. Small issues like cell padding that Firefox and IE6 both interpret differently can make your website look completely different in some web browsers! And I’m saying different in a very bad way!
Have you tested to see how your website/blog looks in different web browsers?
Accessibility and usuability are the buzz words being used on the internet lately. If your site is not accessible or usuable because of poorly coded CSS you could be losing potential clients that are trying to visit your site.
On my laptop I have Internet Explorer 7, the latest version of Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 standalone installed. If you didn’t know already standalone versions of some web browsers are avaliable on the internet, just google for example “IE6 Standalone“. This combats the issue of Internet Explorer installing the new updates over the previous version, and allows you to keep the older browser version for browser testing. I’m constantly testing my site in these browsers, tweaking bits of CSS so the site design and structure remains constant for all surfers visiting the site.
To test my site in Safari, the standard web browser most Mac users have, I discovered BrowsrCamp. BrowsrCamp is a great web service that allows the user to enter there website URL, specify a screen resolution and an image quality, then wait a few seconds for an image to be generated of how various web browsers interprets your site.
BrowsrCamp also allows you to test your site in Safari for free, or Camino, Flock, iCab, Mozilla, Netscape, Omniweb, Opera, SeaMonkey and Shiira at a small subscription fee. Did you know there were so many web browsers out there!
After a few hassles yesterday I am happy to see my sites are pretty bulletproof in Safari, Firefox and different versions of Internet Explorer. I haven’t subscribed yet to BrowsrCamp so I am not 100% sure about the other web browsers, although I am quite confident my CSS is coded well enough. This is a great tool for web designers and developers.
If you are visiting my site using any of the other web browsers specified please let me know if there are any issues. Also if you know of any other web broswer testing services please let us know.
2 responses
A similar resource is available at http://browsershots.org/ They offer a free service that tests on a myriad of platform and browser combinations. It can be slow, but it’s well worth the wait.
I have started to use Swift while testing. The browser is based on the same rendering engine as Safari, so is pretty good to use if you are pc-based.
The current release is Alpha, and it is quite buggy, and has a few rendering issues with text, but I am lead to believe that it is reliable and stable enough to test with.
It appears that the guys developing it have stopped for a while, and they are no longer providing downloads of the borwser.
I have the files on my server, so let me know if you are interested and I will post the link.
D