Checking Browser Compatibility

Posted: August 19th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Browser compatibility is a huge issue for web designers, making sure the site not only looks correct in as many browsers as possible but also functions correctly can be a difficult task. The quickest and easiest method is to download all the popular browsers and test the site on each of them.

The popular browsers in my opinion at the time of writing this are:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • IE 6/7/8
  • Opera
  • Safari

There is an however a problem with this as some of these browsers will only allow you to have one version on a machine at a time, so while IE8 is the latest version of explorer some are still using IE7 and the unpredictable IE6.

Here are a few solutions to help you check not only multiple browsers but also multiple versions of a browser:

BrowserShot is a free online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. It will take screen shots of a site using a wide selection of browsers for, Windows, Linx and Mac operating systems. This is a useful tool for seeing how the site looks, however a downfall of this is that as it is only an image you can’t test the functionality of the site.

NetRenderer is similar to BrowserShot however it only shows screen shots for IE 8, 7, 6 and 5.5. A positive point for NetRenderer is that it is a lot quicker than other browser shot sites, so is very useful for checking how a site will look within IE. But like all other browser shot sites you won’t be able to check functionality of the site.

MultipleIEs by Tredosoft, allows Windows XP users (and 2000 users with a small work around) to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on to their PC. This can useful for seeing how a site would look and function in that troublesome IE. It can however be temperamental with conditional statements and also the browsers are known to randomly crash.

Virtual Machines, such as VMWare, Bochs and Virtual PC, are emulators that can run a version of an OS within another OS. By doing this you could have multiple images of an OS running different versions of the browsers for testing purposes. Microsoft Download Center offer Virtual PC disk images of different demo versions of Windows operating systems with different IEs installed on them which can be used for testing purposes.

2
Comments

  • Mike
    October 16, 2009 | Permalink |

    Check out IETester from Core Services too (Google it). Works on XP, Vista and (now) on Win7 (RC). It will let you check sites on all major versions of IE back to 5.5.

  • Dizi
    October 27, 2009 | Permalink |

    Thanks mike I can’t believe I missed that one out :oops:

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