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:

Konqueror is similar to IE for Windows, in that it is not just a browser, but file manager, FTP program and more. It uses the KHTML engine, which is what the Safari engine is forked from, and is the reason why these two browsers are among the most standards compliant in the field.

Firefox is probably one of the most talked about browsers around, offering a high level of standards compliance and stability, and it is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, performing consistently across each operating system with ease.

Opera was the first browser I saw which offered full page zooming (the ability to enlarge not only text, but images on a web page,) which was a great boon to visually impaired viewers. As well as this, it has many emulation modes, which allow you to test the appearance of a website in a mobile browser, text browser, and many others. While this browser is available for all the major operating systems, it uses a proprietary rendering engine, but does give a higher level of standards compliance than Firefox currently (2008/08/17.)

Internet Explorer is the most popular web browser in use, but not by choice, as it is just the default browser that comes with Windows. This browser happens to fail miserably on standards, crash frequently, is susceptable to a wide variety of viruses and hacks, and generally does its own thing wherever it can! JavaScript support is even worse, as it has its own additions and functionality that unfortunately many web developers use, preventing the site from working on other browsers.

Netscape browser is rarely used these days, and AOL has even dropped support for it, so it is likely this once most popular browser will soon be a shade of the past.Netscape browser is officially dead. This once dominant piece of software has now been relegated to the dusty halls of the past. As such, I'll rarely be testing on it, but I'll leave it on my list of testing browsers for old-times sake.

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, although 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 (as unfortunately, the only versions of these I have seen have to be purchased.) If you happen to be using an inferior operating system like Windows, then you could use the text browser view in Opera.

Safari has long been a browser available only on the Mac OS platform, but in recent times it has seen itself ported to Windows. It offers an extremely high level of standards compliance (with some debate as to whether it or Opera was the first to reach the 100% compatibility mark) and its own display engine for fonts which adds an extra sheen to any site. Unfortunately it does suffer from some quirks, particularly in the JavaScript area.

Chrome is the newest browser on the market, and has a lot to prove still. While it does offer great standards compliance, and startup and rendering speeds unseen elsewhere, it's still only officially available on the Windows operating system. This is set to change in the very near future, at which point Mac OS and Linux users will gain the benefit of process-isolated tabs as well as the aforementioned improvements.