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Does anyone know if there is a website and/or (free) application that can simulate different browser types so you can do better compatibility checking?
Here's a recent thread that addressess the same issue - and mentions a pay service.
[webmasterworld.com...]
It's not free, but one option that would work very well is
VMWare. It cost about $329. It runs on top of Windows
or Linux. With it, you can have many separate "booted up
and running" Windows sessions going at the same time on your
single PC. Each one runs in a separate "virtual machine"
-- which are essentially separate stand alone virtual PCs
within your physical PC. You can switch to a different OS,
such as a different version of Windows with a different
version of IE running about as easily as you can switch from
one window to another on a single PC. You can also run other
"guest" operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.
Like you, I would prefer free. There are some open source
efforts along this line of having multiple virtual PCs
running within a single physical PC, but VMWare is the leader
in this space AFAIK. Don't recall the open source project
names, sorry. Last I read, they were not up to VMWare
capabilities yet.
AFAIK, the options are to have a multiboot setup done manually
or with software like system commander or the VMWare
approach of having multiple virtual PCS running at the same
time. The obvious benefits of the virutal PC approach is
no rebooting when going from one OS to another on the same PC.
The only other option would be multiple PCS with a "X-windows"
setup, AFAIK. But I don't think you're wanting to get that
complicated.
Moreover, while VMware cost about $329, when you figure the
cost of (maybe) multiple hard drives and the time saved
from not having to reboot over time, the cost isn't so bad.
Keep in mind you are supposed to have a separate license for
EACH "guest" Windows PC you install under VMWare, since it
is in fact a separate Wondows OS installation. This would
apply to any multiBoot or virtual PC setup, AFAIK, IMO.
THE book on this subject is the "Multi-Boot Configuration
Handbook". I think it comes with a trial version of VMWare,
which you can also get from VMware's website (30 days?). I
think I recall something about VMware in the FreeBSD ports
system, but I'm not sure. Also something about an older version
that may be available...but suspect it likely would have bugs
the current version doesn't have.
Hope this helps.
Happy Holidays,
Louis
IE, however, is a problem. Old versions are available at OldVersion.com [oldversion.com], but I haven't tried installing any for fear they'd mess up my current version.
Anybody have any experience with that?
All conjecture on my part.
Ross
I have a question for those of you that have experience with this type of software. What sort of machine are you running this software on? It looks like you would have to have a lot of spare RAM available.
I've never tried to open more than one at a time, but I'm not experiencing any problems with closing one, firing up another and checking something out. I thought about trying to find older copies of both, but the info provided from visitors consistently reveals less than 5% of the traffic comes from earlier versions of browsers.
Via a friend, I know things look fine on NS 4.7 and throughout '02, nary an email one to grouse that there are viewing problems with earlier IE versions. Lucky, or blessed, so far, so good.
I've never tried to open more than one at a time
I often run one flavor each of IE, Netscape, and Opera at the same time. But I'm wary of simultanously opening two Moz based browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, Phoenix).
I've had problems with Netscape and Mozilla open together in the past -- problems that actually corrupted those browser installations. But that's the only conflict I've every run into.
I currently have Mozilla 1.1, Netscape 4.8, Netscape 7 and IE 5.5 installed. I often have three different browsers open at the same time, with very few problems (mostly just delays when swapping windows).
So you're not seeing any conflicts between Netscape 7 and Mozilla? That's great news. Netscape 6 conflicted for a lot of people. In fact, it was a royal pain to fix, even with reinstalls.
Although everyone pans NS4.8 I find it to be a lot faster then anything else I run [350MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, Win 98SE] when using multiple windows. Mozilla 1.1 is very slow.
A browser-simulator is no substitute for the real browser, as there is no way that it is going to be coded the same way as the real browser.
The best starting point is to validate your HTML code at [validator.w3.org...] and your CSS at [jigsaw.w3.org...] to remove typos, syntax errors, nesting errors, and unclosed tags. IE is more forgiving of coding errors, so a site that looks good in IE might fail in NS. Once those errors are eliminated, the site should work quite well in all browsers, but there are many specific tweaks for each browser that can be used for some extra special effects.
I run a multi-boot Windows system which I find quite adequate despite having to reboot to switch systems to get at some of the browsers. After all, it is usually only necessary to test pages once after they have been developed.
Advantages are that it's simple, cheap (providing you have a large enough disk), and you can add some of the more obscure or difficult browsers on a partition where it doesn't matter too much if they crash.
.
For those interested in the Free emulation options on 'nix, there's a thread in the Linux/Unix forum [webmasterworld.com] where the idea is being discussed. I blathered on about my emulation setup with respect to browsers for a while there.
For example if you want to run Explorer 5.0 and Explorer 5.5 in separate emulators running WinXP or Win2K you would basically need 256 MB of free ram for each running emulator, so would need ~750MB RAM and a pretty zippy CPU to boot.
Plus, there is no emulator for Macintosh OSX, although there does exist some emulators for older mac OSes, I could never get any of them to work stably.
I do browser testing in Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Red Hat Linux 8 virtual machines. I've had 2-3 VMs open simultaneously with no slowdown. By default, VirtualPC assigns 64MB of RAM to Windows 98 which is quite adequate.
I don't see the point of putting Windows 2000/XP in virtual machine form, it's easier to have them as part of a dual boot setup (like in my case).
Of course, you won't get to see what the site looks like for yourself, but at least you'll know if there are any major problems.
The best course of action, though has got to be validation. That eliminates most of the problems before anyone gets to see 'em.
Good luck!
No problems so far.
Then the virtual machines (VM) and the main OS all share CPU cycles (which for any decent machine is no big deal), so CPU cycles is rarely the problem.
The problem crops up when one of the VM's or the main OS starts swapping memory to disk. Image the worst case: the main OS runs out of actual ram, so it starts paging the RAM allocated to one of the VM's to disk, meanwhile the VM unaware of anything outside itself runs out of RAM, so it starts paging to it's virtual harddrive (which is really the main OS's harddrive). Since both the OS and VM are competing for harddrive time, and all the processes get blocked until the paging is complete, the system spends most of it's time waiting for the harddrive and you get... horrible performance.
VMWare avoids this problem altogether by preventing you from loading more VM's than you have true RAM to support. And you can, to a limited degree, avoid this problem by tuning down your RAM allocation for each machine, but watch out. As soon as one of your VM's starts paging it's own RAM your system performance goes in the toilet.
One thing you can do is turn off everything that's not required in the VM (print services, novell drivers, web and ftp services, telephony, everything). This allows you to lower the total ram requirments of the VM's OS and avoid paging.
