Works On All Browsers

Too often do I find websites which don't work on anything other than Internet Explorer, and occasionally, ones built solely for IE users! This puts a large proportion of web users at a distinct disadvantage, as Mac users are left with a version of IE which is simply useless, and Linux users are left in the dark completely, although there is a very good project called IES4Linux which helps considerably in this area! There are also a couple of projects set up along a similar meme for Mac users, one from the IES4Linux developer called IES4Mac, the other being ies4osx, which is limited to IE 6 at present.

I recently found a campaign called the Viewable With Any Browser Campaign. The site is quite useful to new, and established, web designers, and it offers a lot in the way of advice and guidelines to help in creating a website which works consistently across all browsers.

As part of ensuring this is the case, I work towards creating websites which follow standards compliant code, which can be tested for quite easily now with the W3C validators. With this part of the battle done, I then test on as many browsers I can access. Luckily for me, I work on a Linux machine, so I have access to a much wider variety of browsers, such as:

• 

  Firefox is probably the best browser available for a number of reasons. It's not the most popular (yet, although it's steadily gaining market share every year at IEs expense), but I've not seen one yet that is more versatile in terms of plugins or found on as many different architectures as Fx. It's extremely standards compliant, and has even adopted a lot of the new HTML5 proposed specifications.



Opera is a good browser, and has always been ahead of the pack with regards to implementing new features. It was the first to offer tabbed browsing, had plugins long before Firefox was around, and had a speed dial page (the homepage showing thumbnails of your favourite and most visited links). It's been ahead in standards compliance, and offers more features from HTML5 than any browser I've seen yet. It also has excellent mobile phone versions available which make it one of the most versatile browsers around.

• 

  Konqueror is a very capable browser for the KDE desktop on Linux. Not only is it a very good compliant browser, but also a file manager as well. Also, on-top of offering tabbed browsing, it also allows split panes so you can have more than one web page open side-by-side.

• 

  Internet Explorer is the browser offering from Microsoft, and is the bane of every web developer. Only version 8 has come close to the standards compliance of the other popular browsers, and so far each successive version renders the same page differently, which has led to a variety of colourful hacks over the years. It is also famed for being one of the most insecure browsers around, to the point where some governments have actually issued warnings not to use it. It's also only natively available on Windows, although versions of it can be made to run on Wine

• 

  Chrome (and it's open source cousin Chromium) is the browser from Google. It's one of the fastest browser available, and runs on a variety of operating systems including Windows, MacOS and Linux. One feature it offers that no other browser does is tab isolation, which runs each tab in its own process. While this does use more memory than a conventional browser, it safeguards the browser if one web page crashes or attempts to access data from another page.

• 

  Safari is the Apple browser which has in recent years been made available for Windows too. It's a very fast, standards compliant browser, and is the only one available on an iPhone.

• 

  Elinks is a text only browser, which supports only basic HTML, although it does support tables and frames. It does not support CSS or JavaScript, and only some colour support (16 colours) is available. This is a particularly useful way to test how your website might be interpreted by a speech or Braille browser or a search engine.