Just a quick question about cross browser compatibility. When creating websites its obviously important to ensure they are cross-browser compatible, but to what extent are people going to with this? I always try and ensure we have compatibility among IE 7,8,9 Firefox, Safari (for Macs) and Google Chrome. Any experienced insight is most welcome.
considering chrome, firefox and IE are at 37, 26 & 23% respectively in market share it really is a huge chunk if you're missing out on any one of them. google's rankings are also determined (to some extent) by some information collected by chrome so you might want to match compatibility with search engine rankings if you're looking for that kind of thing.
I have a web design company and every website I design I make sure is cross browser compatible on all browsers, and also make it compatible on all mobile versions as well. Without doing that your cheating your client or visitors you hope to gain
This is actually a good point raised.. if you're developing for someone else then any omissions need to be in their knowledge..
more and more clients these days are more forward and diligent about making sure desigers have their website creation cross browser integrated
All the major ones, yes. All browsers? You check your sites in more than 200 browsers? There are 5 major browser engines, but do you check on Mango (Blackberry), NetFront (Kindle), Presto (Opera Mobile) and KHTML (Konqueror)? (And that's only the engines, not the various browsers using them, each of which has its own quirks.)
Thanks all for the valuable insight. I think I agree with Rukbat and there is only so much that a developer should be required to do as a standard service i.e. ensure all major browsers are checked.
Very Intelligent Post, if we see the topic cross browser compatibility, then we can make websites almost same in look with errors in FireFox, Chrome, Opera & Safari,, but yes IE is a problem if it is less then IE8! As per my view, if client ask me to have compatibility in ie6 or ie7, then i will not give him a guarantee for that, but still i can make a good browser compatibility in FireFox, Chrome, Opera & Safari, IE8 & more.. So if client or customer is stick to have compatibility in less then IE8, then dont waste your time on development until & unless you are very extreme skilled developer! Not much help is also there for IE online!
My advice is test, test, and test some more -- but really these days cross browser shouldn't even be an issue if you have ANY clue what you are doing... Of course it seems NOBODY knows what they are doing which is why so many cross browser "fixing" framework idiocy exists to create more problems than they solve -- typically for garbage that has NO blasted business on a website. IE Conditional Comments are a great example of this idiocy in action -- particularly when you get to things like that stupid malfing "Let's wrap every blasted CC possible around the HTML tag to identify IE" crap Paul Irish came up with, and has become commonplace on half-assed garbage like HTML 5 Boilerplate. If you need conditional comments to make your page render functional in IE7/newer, there is likely something horrifically wrong with how you are building your site! Given there are people out there DUMB ENOUGH to even try to use HTML 5, broken/flawed/outdated site building methodologies is hardly a surprise to see going hand in hand with it. As to what to test, since all the browsers are now FREE, you have NO excuse not to be testing them... Unless you've done something stupid like intentionally tied your hands behind your back with tinkertoy deskop OS like Linsux or OSX... and even then that's what virtualBox is for. Right now my 'standard' is that it be as close to identical as possible in Opera, Chrome, Safari and FF... and acceptably degrading to IE9. I do not care if IE8/lower get a degraded visual experience, so long as the layout is functional and usable. They don't get a few CSS3 effects like text shadows and rounded corners, OH WELL! On the whole 'designers' are ridiculously obsessed with appearance to the point they sacrifice functionality on the altar of th all holy "OOooh, Shiny!". Likewise the javascripttards with their 'pageloads are evil' and 'ooh, Shiny" ego stroking animated BS bloat out pages making it harder and harder to even have accessibility... ... and really that's what we should be saying INSTEAD of "cross browser": ACCESSIBILITY! -- the purpose of a website is to deliver content to users in as easy, comprehendable and usable manner as possible. As such, STOP pissing out crappy fixed widths, crappy fixed metric (px) fonts, goofy graphics that add NOTHING to the page in terms of functionality, goofy javascripts and frameworks that make the page SLOWER for NOTHING... and instead concentrate on content of value, marked up semantically, presented in a minimalist fashion so as to actually be *SHOCK* USEFUL to visitors. Because as a dearly departed friend (and former member here and advisor at sitepoint) once told me: "People do not visit websites for the goofy graphics you hang on the layout, they visit for the content!" Which is why when it comes to 'cross browser' -- most designers are their own worst enemies as they're spending more time stroking their own ... ego, than they are concentrating on promoting the important part of the site -- THE CONTENT... and the more pointless crap you add the harder it's gonna be to make it work everywhere in a useful manner.
cross browser compatibility is very necessary you can minimize or diminish the difference by adding a simple reset CSS file it is kinda helpful.
cross browser compatibility, you needs to be understand the base of standard HTML coding style and CSS. Nowadays you will find lot of hack for every browsers to support very well so, you needs to learn new css technique as well.
This post is really informative. Thank you for sharing the valuable information about cross browser compatibility.
My goal is to create a website that will pass w3c validation. From there, check against all major browsers. Also consider using online tools such as browserstack.