Cross Browser Compatibility

[Murdoch Websites]

So you make a website and you're happy enough with it, until one day, a friend emails you and says 'it doesn't look right on my machine'.

Anyone experienced this?

It is of course (quite often) to do with different systems (windows, linux, mac) and different web browsers (opera, konqueror, firefox, IE6, IE7) displaying web content (particularly CSS and PNG images) differently.

What to do?

Well you can of course go off and learn Flash or Flex, but if you don't have the time for that, then try browsershots.org - Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test - Browsershots

I recently took a look at a page belonging to someone who posts here, and it looks great in everything but IE6! In fact, my own website looks ABSOLUTELY awful in IE6 becuase I make heavy use of transparant PNG files which don't display properly in IE6.

Do I care? Well, yeah a little, although I'm not going to remove the best bits from my site just so that someone using IE6 will have a better view of my page. In fact, if you're using IE6, I don't really want your business - just kidding of course.

See also browsrcamp - BrowsrCamp - it's become quite important to me.

It's also worth noting that while your site might look fine in Firefox on Windows, it can still look bad in Firefox on the Mac! Check it using a tool like the ones I've mentioned and you'll be ok. They're also quite useful if you need to post porftolio images of sites that you've made recently and can't be bothered cropping and chopping things up with Photoshop or GIMP.

anyone still awake?
zzzzz
steve

 

[stugster]

My website doesn't work properly on Internet Explorer - it's not that noticeable, but the top navigation bar (blue) is slightly too high and doesn't look right.

I also use Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test - Browsershots too. It's a bit slow, but really good

 

[alanbold]

IE6, the web designers pet hate. The thing is there are css hacks that get past these problems. I would also check a site in safari as well.

 

[TomB]

Thanks for the browsercamp link that is really useful!

For testing on my machine i have:

Firefox v1
Firefox v1.5
Firefox v2.0.2
Firefox v3

IE 7
Google Chrome

I used IETester for IE 6 but I also use IE NETRenderer which is must faster than browsershots for IE screenshots, it take like 4 seconds to do a IE 6 screenshot

Looking at stats from google analytics, there still seems to be a lot of people using IE6. Why, who can say.

But its a total nightmare to have to ensure your website works across a range of different browsers and platforms. I have found that gogogle chrome can be quite bad.

I was working on a website that was fine on IE, Mac's and firefox google chorme layout was a mess. Strange that!

T