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Is Your HTML Good Enough? 7 Browser-Testing Services

January 12, 2008 - 1:06am — Blake

Cross-browser testing is essential to making sure your pages work right, yet it can be a tough load. Installing multiple browsers on your own computer is only the first step; to do it right, you really need to test across Windows, Mac, and Linux (at the very least), and with multiple versions. You can do it with enough virtual machines and time (as well as the browser archive maintained by evolt.org), but there’s often a better idea: let someone else do the heavy lifting for you. Here are 7 services that will show you what your web site looks like across a range of different browsers, allowing you to do the coding and farm out the testing work.

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January 12, 2008 - 4:22pm — mdoneil

If you are not doing this when you design for external ...

If you are not doing this when you design for external users you are doing a very poor design job. I use Mozilla and Opera much more than MSIE. Mozilla is a Standards compliant browser and will not render in quirks mode.

MSIE will render in Quirks. Designing for something that looks good enough is simply poor design. It is amazing the number of sites I see with DTD HTML 4.01 (or frankly any DTD, or even more oddly a DTD and system ID and poorly formed code. Sure most people don't code by hand, but the improper use of authoring tools, and a laxity in adhering to standards are what brought about the need for quirks mode.

Then again I use "!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en" because I got tired of someone telling me that my page looked like crap in MSIT6 - even though it was properly formatted in every other browser. I gave up and went to the lowest common denominator.

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January 23, 2008 - 6:14pm — leo

Very Useful

I used Browsershots on a recent site. I'll try the other services. They're extremely useful. It's always fascinating to see how the site you're working on looks in IE5.

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