Cross browser testing
It’s inevitable, sometimes annoying and yet, it’s part of our charming job: cross browser testing, and even cross OS testing. As frontdend developers, we want to deliver quality, therefore making sure that what we deliver is functional. It doesn’t have to look 100% the same, their might be some fallback (cf. css3, javascript) but in the end, the visitor has to be able to do what he is ought to do, browse, search, navigate, buy, etc…
So I have my own setup to test everything, but I’m eager to learn new ways.
At the moment I work on a macbook pro, I have vmware fusion running windows xp with IE6 and firefox, windows vista running IE7 & 8 and firefox, windows 7 running IE8 and an ubuntu with firefox and Konqueror. I don’t test chrome because I use safari 4, firefox and opera on my mac to test stuff, but maybe I should add chrome to my vista setup. I also use the iphone developer tools to test sites on iPhone and iPad.
So how do you test your sites?
Comments (11)
You should definitely test in Chrome as well. Chrome
!==Safari!I also work on mac and test in Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
In the past i also used vmware fusion for testing on win but found that rather slow.
With the same amound of money (win license + vmware license) i bought a Win 7 netbook.
Here i test all my sites in IE 6 and 7, using IE tester and in IE 8.
For IE6 i make sure that you can see the information on the site but do not care about the layout. And i add a IE6 update bar.
An extra advantage of the netbook is that i can test my site on a 1024 screensize.
VirtualBox + Windows XP + IE8 which has IE7 compatibility mode.
I don’t care about IE6 anymore ever since Google stopped supporting it.
I find VirtualBox is much faster then VMWare & Parallels, and it’s free.
I currently use Parallels for Mac which runs Win XP with IE6 and Firefox. To test for IE7 and IE8 I use the IEtester because this is the fastest way of working on my MacBook Pro during school hours. Still I should get another way of testing because IEtester keeps crashing which isn’t very helpful ..
Your way of testing is a very good one I guess but needs a lot of RAM .. Especially when you are running Vista !
This might work on an iMac or Mac Pro but this workflow would get me too much delay on my 2 year old MacBook Pro.
@Thomas: There are still lots of people browsing the web with IE6 .. Why neglect them ? It takes a small effort and makes your website accessible for every type of IE browser.
About VirtualBox .. It might be free but it’s impossible to share folders with (virtual and host) which comes in very handy with Parallels en VMWare ! I hate saving my files to an external source so it would be possible to view them in VirtualBox ..
I used virtualbox, but it sucks all memory out of my machine…
How do you test mobile versions of your websites? Or do you only test iphone and ipad? Haven’t tried android or blackberry simulation…
@Dieter De Weirdt: At first I tried the setup wolfr described, but synergy only worked well on windows xp, vista let me down so I switched to vmware…
Another great advantage of using a real pc is off course the crappy screens, as we discussed at the last #jongtuig, the fancy light grey on our macs could be invisiblie for windows users…
Besides actual setups I do like to test using Adobe Browserlab
For first impressions it works fairly well and you can select any setup combination you like.
recently updated aswell with cs5 .
Anybody tested Adobe device central?
Adobe Browserlab is slow. It’s like browsershots, only a bit better.
You can’t test interaction. The only real ways to test: 1) physical machine 2) VMware or Parallels. Always use the real OS, or a virtual machine of the real OS.
Never use any third party screenshot service (screenshots say nothing. Screenshots don’t show javascript errors, hover states, slowdowns, whatn0t); never use software like MultipleIE since your Javascript might be running against a newer interpreter.
W.
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