Forum Moderators: travelin cat
I'm noticing more and more Safari browser visitors in my logs. I have precious few friends with Mac's and none are sophisticated enough to be using various browsers (most are on AOL anyway) to help review my sites. Considering the hype Safari is getting, I'd like to make sure no visitor is disappointed with their experience from my work.
Are there any solutions to simulate safari on a PC? Any techniques I should avoid with frames, tables or CSS? Thanks for any help!
<added>thanks for all the private offers to check my pages, shows the great spirit of helping on this site, but I am really looking for a solution that doesn't require constantly checking with other folks - other than buying a mac! ;)</added>
The one that leaps out at me is lack of gzip encoding support! Meaning it will not take mod_gzip output?!?
Do we have to fix our exclusions in Apache like for Netscape 4 or dpes it just ask for plain output?
Can anyone verify this in the newest Safari?
ah, and I finally found this thread here [webmasterworld.com...]
sorry for the repetition in topics!
yours in happy hacking
Bjarne - København ; Danmark ; Europa
That was a good suggestion about internet cafes. But interestingly, around here there aren't any internet cafes, they all go under rather quickly because this town holds a major university and everyone is required to have a computer. The entire campus is wireless, you can use a notebook almost anywhere on it.
First of all, great post from the PC side of things and shows you are thinking outside the box.
As a Mac developer and very Pro Apple, I had to face the truth years ago that I had to make my work usable for all website users. That includes Mac, Linux, Windows as well as all the major browsers. I built myself a PC (FUN!) Most developers cry about all the different browser... "not another one" but what will set you appart from everyone else is supporting both platforms!
Usabilty is a important issue even if the majority of your traffic may be Windows users. I have heard from industry professionals these exact words "Only 5% of my site traffic is Mac users so it is better to program only for Windows users."
I say building for even an audience of 5 percent translates into 5 percent more potential income.
Back to your question. Be honest with your results in usability, The best investment and smart thing to do - go get yourself Mac. Start with iBook and you can pick one up for as little as $995. (heck check half.com for used ones cheaper) iBook comes with all the applications needed to get you rolling online so there is no additional funky software to purchase. Desktop Macs are expensive (worth it) but I won?t lie to you they are a serious investment. Supporting both platforms from your business is going to show you concerns and passion for usability.
cheers!
Other than that, I'd say test everything in Opera. If it works in both Opera and IE5/Windows, I've found I never have a problem in any of my Mac browsers... unless it's a real PITA CSS three column layout, in which case you really do need to test in both platforms. But keep your CSS layouts down to two columns and you shouldn't have a problem on Mac.
But one good thing about the Mac browsers is that they all "try" to be standards compliant. IE5 was the first standards compliant browser on any platform, NS/Mozilla is almost identical to their PC counterparts. Chimera is based on Mozilla. OmniWeb and Safari have their own engines, yet strive to be standards compliant (Safari will get there). Opera is Opera. In reality each will have it's own quirks, but in general I've found that they all render as you would expect if you're not pushing the envelope to far.
NS 4 and IE 4 are different animals. A lot of Mac users are still on OS 9 and may be using NS 4.7x which is a nightmare. IE 4 is real quirky as well. There you really have to look at it. But the quirks are well documented on the web.
But my consolation at this stage of the game is that NN4.7 users must be getting used to ugly sites by now, so as long as you make sure the site still functions for them, you're good to go.
