Which browsers to check?

[v_1_c]

Hi Guys

Im new here so Im not sure if this has been asked before . How much testing do you guys do on your sites ? What browser and browser version do you test ? Im running Win2000 and so I can only go as low as IE5.5 and I discovered that I can have multiple versions of Netscape so Ive got Netscape4.7 and 6.1 . I also have opera 5 .

Is there anyway of installing multiple versions of IE on the same system , not partioning my hard drive or anything like that . And also can I install multiple versions of Opera on the same system ie. Opera 5 and 6 ?

What other browsers would you recommend ? Mozilla / AOL / Lynx ? As far as I can see AOL displays the same as IE and lynx is only text based (Im not even going to bother with it, no offence)

I think my current settings are pretty much average with testing on IE5.5 , Netscape 4.7 and Opera 5 . Are there any hectic differences if I check on others ? I know Netscape 6.1 is alot friendler than Netscape 4.7 (which is a relief) But are there any others that would show up drastically different that I should have a look at ?

v1c

[korkus2000]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld v_1_c,

I think you are off to a great start with those browsers you do have. I would suggest validating your code at the W3C [validator.w3.org]. You will find that you can catch browser problems here if your code is not validating.

[Nick_W]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Is there anyway of installing multiple versions of IE on the same system ,

Nope, best way is to either run multiple versions of Win on your machine or like me, ask on an email list that allows this....

Or.... install multiple versions and then go to system-tools -> system info -> then 'restore previous version'

Only problem is it's a little touch and go and I'm not certain about Win 2000, being a Linux freak I only have '98!

Nick

[choster]

As IE and Mozilla/Netscape 6 inch closer to standards, consistency should mostly be a matter of adding the right amount of legacy code to make your site appear presentable in older browsers. I test initially for functionality in IE 5.5, IE 6, Netscape 4.7, and Netscape 6.2 for Windows and IE 5 for Macintosh, then recode to ensure that any other browsers common in my target audiences are accounted for. This might be Konqueror and Mozilla for a techie/geek community, AOL 5.0 for a grandmothers forum, or even Netscape 3 for visitors from Kirgizstan or Angola.

[madcat]

I hate that about Microsoft. If you have two computers in the house or office. You can have exactly two versions of Internet Explorer.

This should not be. Not to mention Nick's right about fiddling with their programs, one slight move and you can be in a world of hurt.

[Brett_Tabke]

If you can get it to look close to what you are expecting in IE vWhatever, NNv6/moz, Opera 6, and the w3c validator - pat yourself on the back and call it a day.

[Nick_W]

Good call brett.

Let's make that IE5.0 + validation....

Nick

[rewboss]

It partly depends on who your audience is. If your site is, say, aimed at university students or schoolchildren, you might find testing in Netscape 4.7 more important, especially in Europe. Joe Public might be accessing from work with a fairly recent browser, but his wife Janet Public might be using her five-year-old PC and a 56k dialup. Nigel Geeky-Gamester is probably on broadband and probably using the very latest. Steve Geeky-Coder might prefer Mozilla or Opera. Ms Research-Assistent might be using a text-only browser.

Obviously, in most cases, the more browsers you test on the better. But if you are creating a rock band's official website (for example), you might not worry too much about Lynx or 28.8k modems.

[ggrot]

If you really want to go all out, dont forget things other than just the browser version and manufacturer. Think operating system (mac creates some problems occassionally). Think screen resolution (640x480 or 800x600 min). Think color depth. Yes there are people who bought a computer and didnt know that they could change the color depth to more than 256 colors. But like Brett said, if you can get it to work in Win under 800x600 with a few major browsers, you're not doing poorly.

[The_Warden]

If you wish to have your sire work for old browser try going to [dejavu.org ] and using the browser emulator. Not sure how much the emulator maches the actual brwoser it self but it should be pretty close.

If you wanting to have your web page work in all browsers (not browser specific) then I would recommend developing your web pages to render properly in Netscape Communicator 4.x. Then view the page in say IE, Mozilla and Opera. If you notice a few problems you can do a few tweaks usually and it should work fine. Of course you are limited to what Netscape Communicator 4.x supports.

To be honest it all depennds on the audenice you are develope the site for. For instance if you are doing a gaming site you most likey would want state of the art techonology but if you are making a site for senior citizens then you will want something that supports the old 4.x browsers.

[starway]

Regardless site I'm workin on, it's type or target audience, I always test it in:

1. Opera 6 (and sometimes Opera 5.12 - just for fun in most cases, since there are no any problems in both)

2. IE5 (and I'm sure that what I see will be the same in IE5.5 and IE6)

3. NN4.x (I have NN4.08 and NN4.7 as one of the first and last representatives of the family)

4. Mozilla/N6.2 (any of them, but more frequently in Mozilla since it loads faster)

This is for Win platform, of course. Unfortunately, I have no option to test on different OS.
Regarding NN4 - I make sure that the site functionality is OK, and if sometimes the look is slightly different (like big margins of <H_> tags that cannot be fixed with CSS) I close my eyes of this.
For all browsers I make sure that the layout is exactly the same in all od them.

[Eric_Jarvis]

I create all the mark up for a site, validate the mark up...then take a look in Opera with nothing enabled to get some idea what a bot will "see"...next do the basis of the stylesheets...only then do I look with any browsers as I would expect them to be used...I use Opera for the first set of twiddling the stylesheet...then Ie5...then I use the @import hack to deliver that stylesheet and start slimming down and altering a stylesheet checking against Netscape 4

[v_1_c]

Thanks everyone, You guys answer posts alot faster than other forums . Anyways Ive found my site looks virtually identicle in

IE5.5
Netscape 4.7 + 6.1
Opera 5.12 + 6.04

So Im pretty happy with that . As I found out I can have multiple copies of Netscape and Opera on the same machine but not IE . My new questions are ...

How are far back should I go with Netscape ? Maybe 4.5 ? same with Opera , How far back or are those two alright ?

Secondly , How much of a difference is there with IE from 4.x to 5.5 ? Am I missing anything important ? Will visitors see error messages or will stuff just not appear at all in earlier versions?

Thirdly , Ive heard of people testing on Macs , but Im not to sure how much can go wrong . Could you give me an example of possible problems , like javascript wont work / tables dont display ? Ive never worked with a Mac and I have no cash to get one (Have you seen the exchange rate between South Africa and USA ?)

And lastly , Do you think I should test on Mozilla as well ? Ive pretty much decided against AOL and Lynx and Ive never heard of Konkerer and others .

As far as color , I work with true color(16bit) but only use browser safe colors so I dont think theres a problem with that and resolutions I stick to 800x600 which doesnt look to bad at 1024 . I think Ive taken most things into consideration as far as targetting as large an audience as possible .

Thanks again for your quick responses .

v1c

[starway]

1. How are far back should I go with Netscape ? Maybe 4.5 ? same with Opera , How far back or are those two alright ?
All Netscape 4.x family members are 99% the same. I don't think you should bother about some small differences, because the whole family is already very old and is vanishing (though slowly). All I know that first NN4.08 support Javacript1.2 while last NN7.x support Javacript1.3 (and I always write scripts that don't require anything more than JS1.2, excluding standard DOM scripts that aren't supported by NN4.x at all).

Opera 5.12 and Opera 6.0x have differences, but it seems that you should stick with O6 because Opera community is rather mobile and upgrade quickly.
Also, there are some news about further O7 release (which is promised to have many improvements), so you won't need to worry about O5 at all.

2. How much of a difference is there with IE from 4.x to 5.5 ?
A lot of differences. The main ones are:
CSS support (IE4 is very bad here - like NN4), IE5 is better, IE5.5 is probably better than 5.0, but there were also many IE-olny things added in it, so beware.
Another thing is that IE5 started supporting some standard DOM.
document.all is IE4-only, IE5+ understands document.getElementById (though still support document.all).

3. Can't tell anyting specific about Mac. All I know that IE5 for Win IE5 for Mac are two different things. Opera is also something like that. Netscape and Mozilla are more or less the same here and there, but you can't be 100% sure until you test both versions.

4. Do you think I should test on Mozilla as well ?
Mozilla, Netscape6+, K-Meleon, Galeon, etc. are browsers based on same rendering engine, named Gecko. So there should not be any differences in them. It's the same engine, but different "covers". The only issue is rendering engine version (for example, N6.2 is based on Gecko 0.9, while N7 is based on Gecko 1.x)

So the answer is - YES, get Mozilla and test there (is it very good for development purposes due to it's JS console and DOM inspector, for example). You can be sure that what you see there will be the same in Netscape 6+ as well.

5. As far as color/resolution, adapt your pages to min. 800x600, it doesn't seem to make sence to support resolutions less than that. Also keep in mind that page will look slightly different on higher resolutions. If you follow all this, you'll be OK.

As for me, if we look into future, the most promising ones are Mozilla and Opera (the latter is my choice for about 3 years already).

[Brett_Tabke]

Some browsers you can't test are Slurp, Scooter, and GoogleBot.

The only way to be certain that your pages will be readable by a search engine spider, is to validate your code as close as humanly possible to w3c standard via the w3c validator.

[Ayrenth]

Thanks a mill for the quick response

[The_Warden]

v_1_c
Mac is a tricky thing. The main problem with getting your web site to display roughly the same on different platforums is the font size. Each OS seems to alway use a different setting of DPI. For instances Mac uses 72 DPI and windows uses 96 DPI. Now this is a general assumtion that the user hasn't chnage these settings. To give you a better example say you are using the font Arial at a size of 10 pixels on a Windows system. Everything will look great but on a Macintosh it will not. It will be displayed on a Macintosh as an Arial font but with a size of about 8 pixels. Roughly between Windows and Mac font sizes there is 2 - 4 pixels. Which is a huge deal if you audience is for Windows and Mac users.

The best way I believe to deal with it is to have you web site setup to select which CSS to use based on browser/os. This will allow you to adjust the font sizes so it renders properly. Or you could use em sizes instead of pixels.

Have a read of this article.. it gives an excellant explation of the whole deal for atleast Windows vs. Mac issues.

[wpdfd.com...]

[tedster]

Warden, thanks for that link. A sweet little gem of a rule there:

To form an upper or lower case character takes a minimum of five pixel in height. Because of their ascenders and descenders, it takes nine pixels in height to render a lower case character.

So you can have a five or seven pixel high screen font if it has only capitals, but a normal font, with upper and lower case characters, requires nine pixels.

[v_1_c]

Thanks for all the advice guys , and thanks to The_Warden for the advice on the fonts .

v1c