Cross Browser Compatability17 Nov
I cannot stress it enough that websites must work properly on multiple browsers. Now, I am not talking about all of the hundreds of iterations and types out there, but the major 3 or 4 need to be covered at least. These include Internet Explorer (6, deff. 7), Firefox (2 and 3), Safari (curr. version), and maybe Opera (curr. version). If you look at statistics of who is using what browsers, you will see that IE and FireFox are the most popular:
| 2008 | IE7 | IE6 | Chrome | Fx | Moz | S | O |
| October | 26.9% | 20.2% | 3.0% | 44.0% | 0.4% | 2.8% | 2.2% |
| September | 26.3% | 22.3% | 3.1% | 42.6% | 0.5% | 2.7% | 2.0% |
| IE | Internet Explorer |
| Fx | Firefox (identified as Mozilla before 2005) |
| Chrome | Google Chrome |
| Moz | The Mozilla Suite (Gecko, Netscape) |
| S | Safari (and Konqueror. Both identified as Mozilla before 2007) |
| O | Opera |
| N | Netscape (identified as Mozilla after 2006) |
| AOL | America Online (based on both Internet Explorer and Mozilla) |
Statistics provided by w3schools.com
As you can see, its more critical now than ever for cross browser functionality. The real reason why I wrote this was simply to explain that you no longer need 3 different computers to do web development. In fact, you only need one, and it doesn’t matter anymore if its a PC or a Mac. With a site like BrwoserShots, you can easily manage all of your testing on multiple browsers with a few clicks of the mouse. Sometimes you will need to wait in a queue before processing however, you can pay to upgrade to priority processing which is well worth it if you are doing active development.
Of course, it couldn’t hurt to get a cheap laptop ~$200 for a PC, or ~$300 for an old Mac to do regular testing. Avoid this though with a priority account through BrowserShots and you should be all set.
After I wrote this, I did a quick search to see if the Safari browser for windows would render differently between the Mac and PC. Based on initial reviews, it seems that they both render the same. I will need to continue to test this and will update this post once I have determined that things like form controls, CSS 2.1 / 3.x will render the same on both machines. I still recommend using BrowserShots as a means to do testing.
I have confirmed that using Safari under Windows is a good option for testing on a Windows machine. The rendering engine is the same as on the Mac, and even though BrowserDhots is great for multiple browsers at one time, and browsers that you may not feel like installing all the time with various platforms, at least you can use Safari under Windows easily for this.
I will also say that FF on Mac does render slightly different than on the PC. Not sure why however, I could imagine that there are core OS differences that are contributing towards this. Overall if you create well made XHTML and CSS sites, you should be fine for FF on both the Mac and PC.