Cross-Browser Optimisation

[jaytee]

Just wondered if there are any professional emulation tools nowadays which people are using to check websites under different browsers. We tend to check client sites by using different computers running a range of operating systems, browsers and versions.

Guess it would be a difficult tool to write covering all the different browser versions, but just thought I would check to see if anything was available?

[SuzyUK]

>>Guess it would be a difficult tool to write covering all the different browser versions

Yep, more so now than it used to be. X-browser differences have tamed down to "recommendation interpretation" as opposed to error, in a lot of cases, and as far as I know one single tool does not yet exist which catches them all. Human intervention and knowledge (or doing what you're doing) is likely best

DW has a warning function I believe which catches some obvious well known things/bugs but last I saw it was by no means perfect

Suzy

[encyclo]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld jaytee. Unfortunately there is no single tool to check different browsers, but I find the best way is not to run dozens of actual machines, just virtual ones.

I use VMWare Server, a virtualization program, for testing different OS/browser combinations. I run Linux as my primary OS, and I have Windows available via VMWare. If you have a powerful enough machine (you'll need at least 128Mb RAM for each virtual machine), you can check a site on several OS/browser combinations at once just by flipping between the virtual machine tabs.

There are other virtualization programs from Microsoft and others (or Parallels in Mac OSX), all of which work in a very similar fashion.

[jaytee]

Thanks for that SuzyUK. Thought it was worth asking the question!

We have started using VMWare for server tasks, you are right it is a good use of it Encyclo, condensing the 'test lab' down into one machine. To do a proper job, I guess that just leaves one Mac running the different versions.