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What browser do you use?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:46 am
by ptrpan
I dont know if this topic has been dealt with, so sorry if Im spamming.

I would like to know what the best browsers would be to test my webpages on.

At the moment I have IE, fx and Opera on my machine. Is this efficient, or are there other browsers that I'm missing?

thanks a lot guys

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 4:18 am
by aaronhall
That covers most of them, though they may render differently on different operating systems, and across different versions. Fonts are another thing to worry about. The only major one you're missing is Safari for Mac. If, for some reason, you don't have $4,000 to drop on a mac to test your website, have a look at http://browsershots.org/.

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 4:45 am
by matthijs
... or buy a mac-mini for less then 800 and you've got your Mac-browsers covered (and a good computer as well, but that's another thing)

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 4:51 am
by ptrpan
I wish. Im from South Africa and macs are WAY expensive here.

Believe me, if they where more affordable I wouldve had one ages ago.

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:17 am
by Chris Corbyn
I use Firefox at work, Safari at home (although some things about it are starting to bug me).

The major ones though:

IE >= 6
Firefox >= 1.5
Opera >= 8
Safari (no idea on versions)

Other free ones:

Camino (Mac)
Konqueror (Linux/KDE)
Epiphany (Linux/Gnome)
Lynx (Linux/Console)
AOL (barf!!)
Netscape (Pretty much unused these days)

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 10:56 am
by Kieran Huggins
Camino and Netscape use the same layout engine as Mozilla (the Gecko engine) - their results should be identical.

Konqueror and Safari both use the khtml engine - maybe you could install Linux (in a VM?) and test for Safari (via Konqueror) that way? I don't see why it wouldn't be the same...

My general rule of thumb is to design to web standards and test in IE 6, FF, and (finally) Safari.

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:54 pm
by seodevhead
Best way to test when designing is to use Firefox as your primary development test browser (very standards compliant), and then use IE6 beside it as you go along to make sure any IE bugs are worked out... most notably the double-margin float bug.

I don't see a need to test in IE5.5 or earlier. There just isn't anyone really using those old browsers anymore. You'd be wasting too much time debugging for less than 1% of your viewership.

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 4:31 pm
by alvinphp
The most used browser right now is IE so your best bet is to start with that and then periodically check firefox (especially during the design stage) and Safari for Mac.

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 9:46 pm
by seodevhead
I would STRONGLY suggest NEVER using IE as your primary development/testing browser. The goal with CSS is to test it in the most standards-compliant client you can get your hands on. Because your ultimate goal is to write standards-compliant CSS. Thus, write compliant code, test in Firefox, make any necessary adjustments. Then after Firefox is where you want it, THEN move on to IE and others. Make the proper adjustments for the not-so compliant browsers, and so on. I cannot stress this enough.

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 2:39 am
by matthijs
alvinphp, seodevhead is correct in this. Starting with IE will get you in trouble. Or at least will cost you a lot of development time. Because you start coding for a buggy browser. So in fact you write your CSS wrong. Then, when you see that standards-compliant browser display your site differently, you waist your time writing hacks for your buggy code. Leading to more buggyness and hackyness, etc etc.

My experience lately is that if you write clean, standards-based code for FF, you hardly need any more work to get things correct in IE. Well ok, the occasional quirk comes forward now and then. But using conditional comments and feeding IE a rule or two separately usually does the job.

One tip I would have is to keep the most obvious IE bugs in the back of your mind while writing your code. That might seem to contradict my previous point, but what I mean is that when you already know something is going to cause trouble in IE, deal with that immediately. As an example: the box model. Don't blindly give every box you have both paddings, widths and borders. Give the box a width and no padding and just give the content of the box a margin.

So for me it's now:
- Firefox mac
- Safari mac
- IE (5,6,7) windows
- other browsers (Opera, etc)

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 3:06 am
by Kieran Huggins
a "whitespace reset" will likely save you some pain as well - at the top of every page's CSS I include:

Code: Select all

	/* whitespace reset */
	* {	padding:0;	margin:0; }
	h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, pre, blockquote, label, ul, ol, dl, fieldset, address { margin:1em 5%; }
	li, dd { margin-left:5%; }
	fieldset { padding: .5em; }
	/* /whitespace reset */
this will help bring IE and FF in line, as they have different default styles for these elements.

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 6:30 am
by matthijs
Watch out with the star rule. It resets everything, for form elements as well. Which can be unwanted. So using something like the other rules you had (h1,h2,h3, ... etc {margin:0;padding:0;} ) and only resetting stuff for those elements might be better.

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:29 am
by neel_basu
I use Opera Always.
although I need to test my Pages in Other Browsers like Mozile and IE and Konq. AS I dont have Mac I cant Test in Safari.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:24 am
by alvinphp
seodevhead wrote:The goal with CSS is to test it in the most standards-compliant client you can get your hands on. Because your ultimate goal is to write standards-compliant CSS first.
The goal of CSS is not to test it in the most standards-compliant client, if that was true then you would not start with FF first.
matthijs wrote:Or at least will cost you a lot of development time. Because you start coding for a buggy browser. So in fact you write your CSS wrong. Then, when you see that standards-compliant browser display your site differently, you waist your time writing hacks for your buggy code. Leading to more buggyness and hackyness, etc etc.
If you start with IE then you take care of the CSS problems (using hacks) up front. Having started with IE first to build a page I can say from personal experience that I do not lose a lot of development time by starting with IE.

Thinking about this more I am realizing it does not matter which browser you start with as you still have to make it work for all the browsers you consider important.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:59 am
by matthijs
alvinphp wrote:If you start with IE then you take care of the CSS problems (using hacks) up front. Having started with IE first to build a page I can say from personal experience that I do not lose a lot of development time by starting with IE.
I don't agree. And I think it's a strange way of developing. Why would you start writing code for a browser which doesn't follow the specifications? Then by definition your code ends up written wrong. To give a simple example. You layout a few boxes. Width 200px, padding 20px, border 10px. Now in IE5 that box takes up 200px. So you can fit in 4 of them in the parent box of 800px. Great.

Now you open up FF. Oops. Boxes don't fit!
alvinphp wrote:The goal of CSS is not to test it in the most standards-compliant client, if that was true then you would not start with FF first.
Would you care to explain this? Why don't you want to test in the most standards-compliant browser? And why is FF not standards-compliant?