how do you test CSS on IE6?

All I use it for is the average PSD to HTML jobs, so it does what I need. I had a complex JS on one job and it did sh*t itself, no surprise really though, they even mention buggy JS support.

EDIT: Besides, making an IE6 replica would be hard - if you follow the specs it'll won't turn out anything like IE6!

 

There is a site that show you how you page looks like in different browsers.
Google for browsershots

Thanks

 

Which is COMPLETELY unsuited for real development work. You first have to upload the page to a server instead of being able to work locally, it takes certain browser requests WAY too long to actually show up, and you cannot test behaviors (which with IE's tendancy to screw up :hover)

I've never really understood the point of browsershots since if I was to use it instead of a native copy, template development would take weeks instead of hours given the rate I verify code in each browser.

 

I use it simple to give tons of browsers a quick test. It's a good way of picking up errors in browsers that you might have missed. Also instead of having to fire up Opera 9.5, Opera 9.25 etc I can just use Opera 9.5 and see what the other versions look like from browsershots. If there's something wrong then I fire up the other versions.

It's not a substitute for real browsers, just a tool for helping.

 

Dang, I was just about to suggest IETester. I'm kinda sad to hear about that. ^^

 

See, I find that to be the slower way - because browsershots isn't instantaneous and takes WAY longer than the two seconds it takes to start up another browser. Oh noes, I have to run another program locally... Beats the snot out of uploading to a server, putting the request into browsershots, then sitting there with my thumb wedged up my backside for 5 to 30 minutes for them to actually put the requested shots up. (or worse, have to resubmit becuase it took more than 30 minutes and they offed the request as too old)

Again, if I did that for my designs and the way I test, it would take me a week just for a template that currently takes me an hour or two.

 

I use ubuntu linux as my primary OS and have VirtualBox installed, have XP and native IE 6 in it. Neat.

 

Haha, well luckily for me I live in Australia which seems opposite to nearly everybody It only takes me 1-3 minutes for all 50 shots to be taken as the servers are never busy.

I usually have 20 or so programs going, add another 10 all of a sudden and its chewed up all of its 2GB of RAM (which is doesn't seem to reallocate... even if Photoshop is sitting in the background watching grass grow its still dedicated heaps of resources - yay vista!).

If it did however take 30 minutes I definitely wouldn't be using it...

 

That you're in Oz must be it--I've never once gotten all the requested browsers without at least half of them dropping out of the queue without even a single picture. After waiting 30 minutes.

I gave up on the likes of browsershots a long time ago... though like a junkie I sometimes try to go back when I'm at some other machine and have no copies of some retard browser (but again, I'm lucky to get more than one screenshot out of the 5 I request).

You guys live in the Lucky Land... too bad it's filled with poisonous things though. I'd move there otherwise.

Me too. Problem is, if I want IE7, I needs another Virtual Box, which would have another XP (or Vista) which needs another license, which, I sure as hell ain't going to buy a whole license just for a browser anymore than I'll buy a Mac just to test on Safari or pay through the nose for JAWS if I can get a thumbdrive demo (haven't gotten that working with VB yet).

 

That sucks, I've never had a problem with browsershots before other than the 1 or 2 screenshots that are taken before the page finished loading (though they're some queer browser I don't really care about anyway)

Stay in the city and you'll be fine

Go out back, just keep an eye out for these few animals that are deadly:
- Snakes (of the 10 most dangerous snakes in the world, 8 are Australian )
- Stingrays
- Blue Ring Octopus
- Cone Shell
- Scorpion Fish
- Stone Fish
- Funnel Web Spiders (they're not that bad: on the bright side, you get 15 minutes to live before you die, so you have time to say bye to everyone and think about what a great idea to come to australia it was!)
- Red Back Spiders
- White Tail Spiders
- Sharks
- Crocodiles
- Box Jellyfish
- Irukandji Jellyfish (these are deadly and are about 1cm big, so you can't even see them. You'll just be stung and have no idea what the hell by)

Stay away from those few and you'll be sweet

 

Upgrade to 7, then use the standalones in the VM - end of problem.

 

Parallels sucks, I've heard a lot of bad things about it.. And you think Vista's unstable? Hahaha. Vista's actually pretty good in its efficiency, tbh. It uses less power if you set it to use less power, which I've found doesn't happen when reviewers test it.

It renders with the version you currently have installed...

My solution: buy a $100 box and install XP on it, with the last release of IE6.

 

If it were, I wouldn't have the problem, would I?

They share DLL files, so the standalones still never stand alone. Fine for rendering, but sux0rs for JS and Flash testing.

I'm keeping native IE6 and am going for a "reinstall" (a second virtual box) with IE7 on it. Two native browsers for full testing.

I have this crazy dream... of developing and testing all on a single, portable machine.

Although since i still see HUGE differences between browsers on VirtualBox Windows and a real Windows machine, I'm wondering if I'm stuck always using two machines, and then if that's the case, three if I had a Mac (I am SO no buying a Mac to test on a single browser... screw em).
Biggest difference, besides small spacing issues: object's who do not show will show their children in Safari-for-Windows, FF2 and FF3 on the Virtual Windows, but not on a real windows. So I get blanks or white boxes where the Flash paths are incorrect and the child should show, but only Opera and Konqueror show the children on real Windows and Linux.

 

I have not noticed those issues. Can you link to a test case for illustrative purposes?

cheers,

gary

 

You've HEARD bad things, huh? Impressive. You know, I have a saying, don't badmouth something you haven't even USED. Parallels Workstation 2.2 is about on-par with Sun's VirtualBox and M$ VPC on the PC side of things. Piss poor Win9x support, no DirectX, but XP runs just fine. It has all the same features and provides roughly the same stability. It also does not hijack the host OS like VMWare does with a half dozen processes even when not in use. The only 'bad' things that can be said about it is it costs ***SHOCK*** Money (what a concept, I can hear the unwashed dirty hippy FLOSS ***'s kvetching already) and that it hasn't been as actively developed as the Mac version.

Parallels Desktop 3.0 is the most elegant solution for the Mac since it integrates the programs to the host desktop, and provides some rudimentary directX support. Other competitors attempts at this (VMWare fusion) just do not compare.

Sure, it's a litle sluggish - duh... I hate to break it to people, but for the most part these "VM's" are still emulators. USB Stack is emulated, disk interface hardware is Emulated, video hardware is emulated, and for all the talk of virtualization the VM still has to parse all code before it even THINKS about letting the CPU run a section of it native. They're all going to be slightly slower than running the OS native - but it beats the crap out of rebooting or running another whole computer.

Try it with a Ge8 or newer video card some time. Nothing like having the video card suck 95+ watts the whole time you are using the machine. Oh yeah, less power use my ASS.

Sure, if you are on some crap integrated Intel chipset everything powers down and all your hardware plays nice... But on the following config:

Q6600 CPU w/8 gigs DDR2/800
eVGA nForce 680i Chipset Mainboard (3x PCI x16)
640 meg Ge8800GTS OC (driving center display)
256 meg Ge8400GS (driving left and right display.)
Adaptec U320 SCSI3
1x 1g Samsung F1 SATA (mass storage)
1x 750 gig Samsung F1 SATA (boot partitions)
2x 160 gig 10K RPM WD Raptor SATA (Raid 1, work)
1x 80 gig 15K RPM WD Raptor SCSI3 (Swap partitions / files)
1x 18 gig 15K RPM WD Raptor SCSI3 (Linux only)

That works flawless under XP, XP x64, and Ubuntu 8.04... when I last tried Vista after SP1 hit, the above config wouldn't even let me have any program open without crashing every 20 minutes. NOTEPAD would lock up - and when applications locked up they didn't say "Not responding", they didn't respond to trying to kill their application or their processes, they just continued to 'render' on the desktop despite no longer accepting input. The same result I got when Vista first came out, the same result I got 6 months after, same results time and time again. (and YES, I do know to disable NCQ on the F1's)

Mind you, the little crap Celeron E1200 machine I use in my workshop can run vista without a single problem - again, narrowed hardware base. Vista + nVidia == /FAIL/.

Though even when it works all applications running 10-15% slower than they do under XP is all I needed to see, and why I'm just fine running XP x64 on my primary workstation.

Of course leaving you high and dry on testing 5.5... Though the real answer right now is to just USE XP AS YOUR DEVELOPMENT OS since thanks to standalones you can run every version of IE side by side without problems NATIVE, as well as examples of every other browser out there without problem. (Unless of course you are dumb enough to use Outlook or browse pages you didn't write or haven't checked the code of in IE)

But again, it often seems like most of the complaints against Windows XP haven't been true since Win98, with the possible exception of M$ BLASTER.

As I've told a few clients: Warez + 'free' Porn + IE + Outlook... Gee, your machine is screwed up with bloatware, keyloggers and viruses why exactly?


You know, just for laughs I'm gonna go grab a spare 320 gig SATA drive I have and see how/if the drivers have caught up yet. I'll post the results in 'general chat' with the title "24 hours with Vista - take 4" since I do own Ultimate x64.

 

But its rendering is dead bloody accurate, I've tested it against a fresh XP install and it works perfectly. It crashes unexpectedly occasionally, but its better then having to boot up a VM and switch to that everytime I want to refresh.

 

Lawlz, those damn dirty Stallman wannabees : )

Gary, I could post screenshots (in another thread I think) of this page: http://stommepoes.nl/Guisy/guisy.html

Since the page is on hold, it's temporary. But three objects in use, first two with Flash and the last with the w3c version except the text child is replaced with an image child (which fux0rs with Safari).

I get FF2, FF3 and Safari doing what I expect them to do in VirtualBox which surprised the hell out of me, because every native Winmachine in our office shows a white block where the Flash is. no Flash, no problem. I've had some people over teh interwebs also confirm they saw nothing on their native machines. IE6 doesn't work on either machine (VB has native, Winmachine has Tredosoft version which never worked with Flash).

FF3 on a Winmachine at work shows nothing, while FF3 on this Ubunut machine shows all children. Frustrating as hell.

 

just google search Multiple IE and you can get all the standalones, but whyyy

lets all just drop it and people will get the point

 

@ Kitten:

Opera and FF3, Windows and Linux work as expected.

FF2, in Win, oddly doesn't work; blank area for #1, white box for #2 and nothing at all for #3.

IE6, oddly enough, has the bouncing cat in #1, a white box in #2 and nothing at all for #3. I say oddly, because IE6 does not support alternative content in <object>, at all.

IE7 is the same as IE6.

Chrome (Webkit) and Safari are the same as FF2, except that there is a broken image icon for #3.

Konqueror (KHTML) Works correctly for #s 1 & 2 and has a broken image icon for #3.

Lynx, of course, renders perfectly.

I didn't look all that closely at the code, but it's odd that there are problems in browsers known to handle alternative content properly, eg. FF2

cheers,

gary

 

Here's the standalone IE6 browser that I use.

I've uploaded it to my server:

http://www.pressrelease001.com/ie6eolas_nt.zip

You have to have IE7 installed.

As I wrote before if you are using conditional comments then it will read the link in the header of the html file as IE7

For instance:

<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="../styleie7.css"
/>
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="../styleie6.css"
/>
<![endif]--> 

Code (markup):

The above is the correct method conditional comments method - but using this standalone means that it will read the IE7 rules not IE6 - so you have to swap he contents of the file around...

I think that makes sense...