The Mac/Safari issue

never worried about them till now

[mcjohnson]

Friends,

Up until now I have designed for IE/Firefox/Opera and all the other PC browswers out there, primarily using CSS as a framework.

Until I had a client look at their prototype on a MAC and tell me it was not rendering properly. Hmmmm...

Is there any way to include the Safari browser rendering or mimic how it renders using a PC or do I need to get on a MAC somewhere and look at my work? Is there a MAC/Safari workaround in CSS or do we, as PC designers, pretty much let the MAC folks worry about their own design rendering problems?

I notice there is very little if any talk about Mac users on the majority of the forums here which leads me to believe we don't really take them into consideration. Any thoughts?

Pat

[Krapulator]

If you are designing to standards, most things will look correct in Safari. However, to be sure, you really should test on a Mac at some stage along the development process.

The Mac Mini is a pretty good investment if you just need a Mac for testing (or buy an older one on E-Bay).

[Jimmy Turnip]

mcjohnson,

visit [danvine.com...] which is a site where you can enter your web address and then it takes a screenshot of it on a mac. It then posts it a few minutes later on the site.

Obviously getting a look on a real mac is preferable, but at least it will give you some idea of what it looks like.

[mcjohnson]

very cool. Thank you!

[encyclo]

The screen capture services are somewhat useful, but they don't start to give any information about functionality in terms of CSS :hover or Javascript, for example.

I don't have a Mac (and have no intention of buying one), but I do test my sites in the KDE Konqueror browser, which is a close cousin to Apple's Safari (they share the same rendering engine). If you are not running Linux, the easiest way of testing is to use a Knoppix Live-CD - it's a complete Linux environment including KDE on a bootable CD which leaves your usual operating system completely untouched.

[2by4]

Unfortunately, safari and konqueror codebases are in the process of being forked, the new safari, 312/412 will probably not be integrated into konqueror, although for current stuff you can test safari rendering on konqueror by simply downloading a kde based linux live cd, either kubuntu or kanotix will work very well for testing, and don't involve installing linux on your system.

[dcrombie]

Ah, but they've just announced the WebKit Open Source Project [webkit.opendarwin.org] which could lead to a port of Safari for Windows.

[whoisgregg]

You can also look for a friendly Mac Webmaster [webmasterworld.com] who has the time and willingness to take a look at your sites for you. I've been known to post screenshots and even occasionally fix bugs myself (time permitting).

[ltboy]

Another Alternative is to grab QEMU and drop a copy of OSX on to it.
There's actually a free service on the web that uses QEMU to give you screens of how your page will looks accross different browsers and different OSes(Windows, Linux, OSX...) but I can't remember their name.
There is also BrowserCam which has a computer farm you can log into via VNC or RDP to test web sites on.
If you're using windows, just a sugestion, don't. It's a pain in the butt because, as far as I know there's not even a semi-easy way to emulate other operating systems under it. In Linux there's Wine and QEMU, and, well, I don't know about MacOSX because I don't have a Mac.
If you want to use linux without installing it then a Knoppix CD is OK, but I'd actually recommend an amaroK one since they provide you with the tools and tutorials to change things around on the CD.