Online tools to test your website browser compatibility

It is an essential element of good website design that you test your website and how it looks or (renders) in as many web browsers as possible – though it is worth remembering it is impossible to design a website to look exactly the same in all browsers...

NetRenderer allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 or 5.5

Website: http://netrenderer.com



Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different operating systems and browsers.

Website: http://browsershots.org

Source: hobo-web.co.uk/ie-test/

 

That is silliness. Unless your client is throwing gobs of $$$ at you, there is no good reason to worry about IE<8. In fact, with the release of IE10, Google announced they are no longer supporting IE8.

There is only one way to check browser rendering: open the page in the browser.

cheers,

gary

 

I disagree with you on that point...
Lots of people still use Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201203-201302-bar

(sometimes I test my websites in Netscape navigator 9.0.0.6 just to be sure...)

 

It's your waste of time; waste it how you will. It also means you're pretty well stuck with a limited palette of pre-css2.1 specifications; not to mention that gawd-awful hasLayout.

Anyone, and by anyone I mean every Tom, Dick or Harry, using IE7 and older should know by now that his browser will not properly render a modern web page.

But, as I said, it's your time to waste.

cheers,

gary

 

Dropping support for XP users is shortsighted and stupid Gary, though shortsighted and stupid describes Google perfectly the past four or five years since they started pissing away accessibility, speed, usability, crap all over themselves with javascript for nothing and on the whole have become the antithesis of what let them kick altavista and jeeve's asses a decade and some change ago! There's a reason that if they can clean up their results a bit and get back to their roots Duck Duck Go actually has a chance. (and why a LOT of people have switched).

Imagine if developers had taken that attitude when Mozilla was only 3% of the market. Beware alienating users just because it's a small percentage -- eventually you'll have so many small percentages that when added together you'll have alienated everybody! That attitude might work for small in-house crapplets; it has no place when developing a website for what websites are FOR -- delivering content to users.

That said, testing IS important, but you have to draw the line on certain bits. Right now my policy is that pages will WORK and render 'useable' in older browsers, but they don't have to be 'perfect'. There is NO legitimate reason you cannot make a page that WORKS all the way back to IE 5.5 for little or no extra effort; -- they don't get some of the CSS3 goodies like rounded corners, text-shadows, box-shadows, etc, etc.... OH ******** WELL. BIG HONKING DEAL.... Basically they don't get the neato visual effects, who gives a flying purple fish!

As to using 'online' testers, you cannot test interactions, resizing behaviors, scripting functionality, default font metrics, or any of the dozen other things one usually needs to test. A bunch of goofy screencaps is useless -- especially since in my experience things like browsershots and netrenderer NEVER render anything like the actual browsers do here for me. Much less the wait such tools often incur; in my local testing I do ten revisions and tests via alt-tab F5 in the same amount of time it takes for those to report back!

That's why I suggest finding an old XP sticker off a dead machine, grab an XP CD, install virtualBox, and test in the *SHOCK* actual browsers. Also helps to grab a copy of OSX Lion Server since that too will run under VirtualBox so you can test Safari and FF Mac... FF for OSuX in particular since it quite often behaves NOTHING like it does under Winblows/Linsux... and of course a VM of Linsux doesn't hurt either since freetype often kerns text like a sweetly retarded crack addict, resulting in different total text widths.

Of course you want to be a real nutjob, you could also install Haiku and test how Webpositive handles things ... or am I alone on that one?

 

I am not going to spend additional time on obsolete browsers, especially IE<8, without charging for it. And, I am not going to try to make those obsolete browsers look like new. I have coded and will continue coding to the standards, providing fully functional html pages. My ingrained coding habits are so geared toward IE6 work-arounds that I doubt my pages suffer overmuch in IE6/7, and especially not in v.8. IE7 was not a major upgrade, being in reality only a UI and bug-fix minor revision of v.6. IE8 was, however. It got rid of that MSO artifact hasLayout, making major steps toward becoming modern. It is still behind in css support. I'm not sure v.9 really deserves to be called a major revision due to its not being all that improved over v.8, but I'll go along. (The other vendors tend to over-inflate their revision numbers, too. So I'm not picking on IE here.)

People with obsolete machines, running obsolete browsers cannot expect all the bells and whistles. They should expect functional, usable websites, and my coding will continue to give them that. Any other result is a failure to properly develop the site.