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How do you test your website in all the different combinations of browsers/operating system/physical screen size.
It seems to me that IE & FF have most of the market share these days. However, considering just these two for a moment, there are different Windows versions of IE & FF and different Mac versions, and different unix/linux versions. All potentially are different programs.
There are also different browsers such as netscape, opera, safari, etc etc that have lesser market share but nevertheless, 1% on the web is a significant number of people who might want to visit our site.
I assume web developers just get as many different versions of the various browsers and install them on their PC/Mac and see what their website looks like in these programs. Am I correct?
The other thing is that there are screens that are wider, and screens that are squarer. The wider screens will break some not-so-well-designed websites.
Most of what you need to test for can be handled on one computer, some of it by making changes to the Control Panel's "Display" settings.
First, you don't need to be concerned about physical size of the monitor - what matter is the screen resolution. To be even more precise, what matter is how many pixels are available in the browser window. If you have one system with a nice large screen resolution, you can make the browser window so it's not full screen. Then just resize the browser at will, seeing how your layout responds to various window dimensions. Opera is nice for this because it has a setting that allows you to display the pixel dimensions of the window, in the upper left corner of the window's chrome.
When it comes to various browsers, you can install Firefox, IE, Opera and now even Safari [webmasterworld.com], on one Windows machine. Microsoft has also released a formal solution that allows you to run IE6 and IE7 on one computer [webmasterworld.com].
On to operating systems. It's been many years since I stumbled over a browser that rendered something different on different operating systems - and even then it was a rarity. The last such incident I remember involved small IE 5.5 differences on Win2K and Win ME. The issues even then were small, and I don't think it's worth investing in a major testing resources to probe for operating system compatibility issues.
A few other areas are worth testing - color depth (be sure to test at both 16-bit and 24-bit or 32-bit) and system font settings. Both these tests can be done on one computer with changes inside the Control Panel. From an aesthetic point of view, it's also good to view a site on both a CRT and a flat panel.
So people just load up IE 6 & 7, FF, Opera and Safari on the same PC and test their website that way then?
Thanks for your answer.
There are also sites on the internet that provide a service to display how your site will look on different operating systems and in different browsers. Check out [browsershots.org...] although it may take a long time with some OS and browsers before you get results and you have to refresh your request sometimes.
