Which browsers do you test in?

[gno]

Hi fellow tricksters…

I wondered – which browsers do you test in when you design websites?

Is it just the “big five” (opera, ie, firefox, safari and chrome) in the most recent versions – or do you dig yourself down the IE hole and have multiple versions of the other browsers aswell? I’d like to know what YOU personally think is the best practice. I think that there are a lot of different views on this – and it would be quite interesting to hear the reasoning behind your choice of test browsers.

I’m slacking quite a lot on this one my self – in development phase I only use Safari in the newest version. When I’m done I’m digging out my old computer to run a test in IE7, and then checking the rest in Opera, Chrome and Firefox on my mac. Most of the time, I have no differences on view in the different browsers.

If you are checking in more browsers than me – how do you handle it? Virtual Machines with different versions installed?

[SmashDeveloper]

Hi Gno !

Well, it is a hard to explain question. I’ll try my best. When I’m developing the site, I usually use Chrome or Safari (they are both web-kit browsers) because they show similar results. When I finish all the development of the site I start to check how the site renders on other browsers like Opera and Firefox.

There are always a couple of glitches that you might want to fix when you are working whit them, but it seems to be very fast and painless after a few times… And than comes the pain.. IE.

I use this (http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/) to check the render result in IE. There is and will be a couple hours of tinkering around it.

I hope this is enough info about the request :)

If you need more just send me a message,
SmashDeveloper

[snillor]

Develop in Firefox 3.6.13

Test in Safari 5.0.2, IE 8.0, and Chrome 8.0. May or may not bother looking at the site in Opera 11.0.

(I appreciate the link to netrenderer – will check it out.)

[Luminated]

I test in the biggies, and only go back as far as IE7 for IE.

Honestly, if you’re code is up to snuff, troubleshooting older versions of browsers (IE aside, of course) really shouldn’t be a problem. Firefox 2.0 is the only older browser version that I find gets a bit funky sometimes and considering my Analytics show virtually no usage of it, I don’t worry about it.

And I almost always throw the URL onto this site:

http://browsershots.org/

[gno]

Thanks for your inputs. It seems that most of you share my point of view on this subject.

So the only needed addition to my current test setup – if I keep away from funky CSS3 stuff – would be IE7 (and possibly 8)…

[TT_Mark]

I unfortunately have to test in IE6 as well due to the nature of my business, however do not go back to Safari 3 or Firefox 2. Generally do not see the point as people who use these browsers are generally more clued up on upgrading

[dhechler]

I test in Chrome, Safari (even though they are both built on the webkit engine), firefox (3.6 and 3.4 just to be safe), IE 7-9 (stopped developing for IE6. I make sure it works in 6, but don’t ever fix things just for 6) using IEtester on my windows machine. http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

That’s about it. As long as I’m sure it works in all of those ( minus IE 6 ), then I’m happy. Also, if I really care or the client has asked, I will do a mobile web version for the iPhone and iPad (which usually translates to the Droid browser, but I don’t claim to develop for ANY Droid web browser as there are too many to test on, don’t get me started on that)

Here’s a pie chart with all of the different types of droid releases. I know not all of these have different browsers, but I don’t want to find out which ones run what.
http://androiddelight.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Android-Distro-by-Handset.png

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