Cross Browser Testing Made Easier

When designing and developing a website, one of the more important issues is getting it right in as many browsers as possible. Yes, I know its 2010, but even today we still don’t have a real set standard that all browsers use for rendering a website. Browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox have multiple builds, and each one displays a website slightly different. For a designer / developer this is a very frustrating thing!

So once you get your design complete, then you must begin checking all the different browsers to see which ones you need to fix your design in. Most notorious is Internet Explorer 6, which if you are still using this browser, by all means please UPDATE! Not only does IE6 butcher most designs, it is also a very insecure browser!

Anyway, once the design is set, you start checking it against as many browsers as you can. The problem is that it can’t always do that easily. For example, if you want to check your design in all the IE browsers, you have to pull a lot of tricks out of the hat. You see, you can’t run multiple versions of IE on your computer as the latest version replaces the prior one. You can run virtual pcs and install different versions that way, or modify the code of the IE versions to allow them to work side by side. However, these are not the most optimal way of doing things.

Another option is using an online service such as BrowserShots, where your webpage is rendered on multiple servers and different browsers. This can take a long time to get the results, in some cases cost money and you normally get only an image, not the live site. What if there was something better? There is!

I just downloaded the Microsoft Expression Web 3 SuperPreview program. This very cool program compares your website using IE 6, 7 and 8 as well as Firefox. You can see the different browsers side by side, one above another and the coolest view… layered over each other! You can also click on different sections to find out size discrepancies and more. Its a very cool program that seems to have a lot of promise.

It does not compare every browser out there, but since the different versions of IE account for roughly 2/3 of the browsers used online and Firefox uses about half of what’s left, you will cover the vast majority of users. From what I have seen, there was a free version of it that only compared IE versions. I think that is still available, but you will need to search Google to see. I have a paid copy that includes other browsers like Firefox, and it also comes as part of Expression Web 3, Microsoft’s version of Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

I encourage you to check it out if you are a designer / developer. It may make your life a bit better!