How can I tell what my web page is going to look like in older browsers? IDK, maybe its bad coding technique, or maybe I am sloppy, but my webpages render identically and perfectly in the latest versions of chrome, firefox, opera, safari and IE.... BUT... My boss still has IE 7 installed for some reason and there are usually weird spacing issues that need to be fixed... Is there a way I can see what my web page is going to look like in older browsers?
IE is tricky. It's so integrated into the o/s that it's hard to run two versions at the same time (thanks MS!) But there is a pretty easy way to get around this. Get VMWare Workstation and install Windows into a virtual machine, and you can run a separate version of IE in there.
since I have win7 pro, I'm going to DL windows XP mode I guess and install IE 7 in there.. unless windows XP mode comes with IE 8... then I'm screwed.
Yup, WinXP mode comes with IE6, how archaic... no support for transparent png's even! I'm installing IE7 as we speak so that I will be able to see problems better now. Stupid IE.. Turns out (over the past 6 months) 8% of the people who view our webpage have IE 7 so I guess its worth while to make sure it looks ok... Although I bet a huge chunk of those views are from my boss using his browser
Yeah, unfortunately there's people still using even IE6. I think it's mostly people working for big companies who are slow to switch. The site I support still has 10% IE6 traffic, so I envy you if you don't need to worry about that one.
If you want to install old versions of ie (from 1.0 - 8) you could try something like this. I use it for testing sometimes and find it to be pretty stable. I am running XP Pro SP3 and don't have any problems. According to the article, you can use the same download for Vista. Of you don't want to install all that on your computer or it doesn't work for you, you could try something like this: http://crossbrowsertesting.com/ They have all browsers on their servers and you pay for time. There is a free demo though but it's pretty limited and wouldn't work for long term testing of new features.
http://www.browsershots.org/ It only does static captures, but it's good enough to get a general idea of what's going on.
The best way to test on a 'real' config to get accurate rendering is to download and install virtual machines with real IE versions installed. Fortunately, M$ knows their browsers are ... shall we say ... special ... and provide everything you need in a ready-made disk image - I use them at work and they're great (light, quick start-up and perfect for testing a page or two in under a minute): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en VPC is free these days, so you can do it with little fuss and no outlay.
You could do a search and download IETester, this has versions of Ie included all the way back to 5.5, and includes a beta (I think) version of IE9 too. Very useful for testing lots of versions of IE quickly. For IE 7 do you not have compatibility mode on your version of IE8?
There are developer tools (I think it is an addon to IE8) that can help a lot when coding for IE (includes IE7/IE8 compatibility mode/IE8).
Whenever I'm doing research on how my website is looking on other web browsers I use browsershots.org as well. Probably one of the most hassle free ways of getting the job done quickly.
This is why I like to keep old browsers installed if I can! But yeah, I agree that browsershots is a good tool to use.
IETester is fine for a quick check, but suffers the same problem as using IE8 with compatibility mode - it's emulating something, and an emulation is never the same as the real thing. You'll always get behaviors that aren't strictly identical to the actual version, so if it really matters to get an accurate rendering of page behavior, you really should be using the real thing.