Like every webmaster, I want my website to look the same in every browser. So, what do you do. I don't have a Mac or older versions of browsers. For example the browser at school (IE) renders my CSS differently then IE7 at home. How do I find how my site looks in various browsers. Are browser photos enough? Skinny
There's http://www.browsercam.com/ You can grab a free copy of VirtualPC from Microsoft which allows you to use virtual machines to run different OS/browser versions. VMWare and http://www.virtualbox.org/ do the same thing. If your budget allows it, then a Mac Mini does for testing Safari. There's some free services that will generate a screen shot if you don't mind a wait.
Thanks tolra. I definitely will used the above services you mentioned. I just wanted to know that is enough. Do I have all my bases covered? Skinny
If you take the example of using VirtualPC for testing IE6 then you are running a real copy of IE6 on it's own operating system, therefore what you see should be the same as what a real IE6 user sees. browsercam is supposed to be the same idea of letting you see real installs of the different browser versions, but I've never used their service.
I design my webpages compatible with all major browsers i.e., Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. You can download both Firefox and Opera for free. Together IE (5.5+), Firefox(1.5+), Opera(8.5+) and Netscape constitute more than 90% of the internet browser. For a normal website, they constitue more than 99.9% of the total browsers. So you need to be concerned with these browsers only.
What I do is this: Develop using Firefox (largely because of the web developer toolbar and other useful extensions, also because it is my main browser anyway). Test in Opera, IE and Konqueror. Although Konqueror is not itself widely used, Safari is based on it (to be accurate, Safari renders pages with KHTML, which was originally developed for Konqueror). The Apple and Konqueror versions of KHTML are not identical, but if a page works right in FF, IE, Opera and Konq then it is really unlikely to break in Safari. The main advantage of this approach is that I can test everything using my usual (Linux) desktop, without needed special test machines. Doing this this way, the only problem that visitors to my site have complained about is a rather obscure one caused by a bug in IE6 running on Windows 98. If you want to be really sure, you need at least a browsercam subscription (OK for static content), or multiple test machines (essential if you want to test AJAX and other fancy stuff properly). The other thing to do is keep things simple. The simpler your HTML and CSS the more likely it is to look the same everywhere, and the easier it is to avoid known issues (border box model etc.)