How Do You Test Your Web Pages?

Pieroxy asks: "As a web developer, both professionally and personally, I try to always make sure what I write works in every browser at my disposal. When the choice came for me to choose a platform for my PC, I went the Windows route, because I cannot afford not to test IE on all those websites/applications. But now I am facing a problem with all browsers that don't have a native Windows port, such as IE5/Mac, Safari/Konqueror. kde-cygwin helped very little because the version of Konqueror shipped doesn't display most JPEG, making any testing worthless. IE5 for Mac should die soon, but is still widely used as being the default browser for so long. How do you test your web pages? Have you noticed discrepancies on how a specific engine (Gecko, Opera, KHTML) renders content on different Platforms? Do I need a Mac and a Linux machine to make sure it is working on these platforms?"

Comments

Validator

[wishus]

http://validator.w3.org/

Re:Validator

[JimDabell]

I'm sorry, but that's simply not good enough. Writing valid code is only a very small part of making a robust website. You can write perfectly valid code that fails to display properly in any major browser. For example, not testing in Internet Explorer 6 will leave you prone to a couple of very nasty bugs that cause large sections of the page to simply not get shown.

Re:code to the standard

[Hank Reardon]

Not really...

There are a ton of bigs with Internet Explorer and the way it "works" with the standards, particularly CSS Positioning.

A site I frequent for various work-arounds to get things working under both IE and working CSSP browsers is A List Apart. It's amazing the number of funky comment-within-comment hacks that you have to perform to get sites to display properly across two or three "standards compliant" browsers.

Re:code to the standard

[cyber0ne]

But even "standard" code can render differently in different browsers on different platforms. Depending on the complexity of the website/application, small differences can be a big problem.

At my last job I kept a log of browsers/platforms that hit the webserver. From the vast majority (at the time, IE5 on Win9x) down through the percentages, I would run what I could for testing. For example, using whatever tool of choice (VMWare on my home network was what I used), I tested my sites in IE5 on Win9x, IE5 on Win2K, Netscape, Mozilla, etc, etc. I think I was regularly testing on maybe the top 6 percentages in the log, capturing about 99.5% of the hits.

There will always be a percentage of browsers in the world you can't test, be they either little-used browsers on little-used platforms or widely-used browsers with some strange configuration that messes things up. But if you can identify the majority of the variations that are hitting your site(s), then just test as many of those as you can before you feel confident that it's "as compliant as it's going to get."

BrowserCam

[bjpirt]

If you don't want to buy a mac, you could always use browsercam

Of course you messed up in the first place not getting a mac. You can test in PC/IE from the mac, but not the other way around.

Re:BrowserCam

[aWalrus]

Or you can try iCapture, which is free.

Mac

[octover]

I have a PowerBook that I do my web development on. I then use Virtual PC to test the windows IE stuff. I have found that the Mozilla rendering engine on windows/mac/linux is pretty much the same, i.e. testing on one is good enough for all (granted I try and stick with writing things once and having it work everywhere so its the safer (X)HTML/CSS).

Re:Virtualisation thing

[orthogonal]

Ever heard of VMWare or Virtual PC?

Or consider the Free alternative of coLinux, which allows you to run several linux distrubtions under MS-Windows.

Re:code to the standard

[Basje]

That's a self fulfilling statistic: people with an unsupported browser (in which the page won't render correctly or at all) won't return. Thus, the supported browsers will always be top in the logs, unsupported browsers will stay at accidental hits.

Just save yourself the trouble and get a Mac.

[tweder]

I'm a professional web developer and I can safely say I couldn't be nearly as productive without my Mac.

I do my main development in BBEdit, checking against Safari's rendering engine. As things are shaping up, I'll check it in Mozilla (and variants), Mac/MSIE (we HATESSSS it!), as well as VirtualPC running Windows 2000 to keep ensure things are looking good in Win/MSIE, and lastly Lynx to ensure that content is properly available, despite lack of formatting.

This way I feel I've got all my bases covered.

KHTML (Safari, Konqueror)

Gecko (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, etc...)

MSIE::Mac

MSIE::Win

Text-based (lynx, WAP, screen readers, etc...)

My Macintosh lets me get everything done with ONE computer on my desk. No need to deal with the upkeep of several boxes, as well as the real estate they'd all require at my workspace.

Re:code to the standard

[britrock]

I generally write to the standard, and then spend a few hours after the fact making it work in ie. Safari/Khtml and Mozilla/Firefox are really very good at following the standard.

There are of course quirks in all of the browsers though. There is a REALLY great site to help with that though. quirksmode.org lists each css attribute, and has a table showing which browsers it works in, and which it mostly works in and so on.

You really can do some amazing things if you follow the standards AND work around the quirks. I try to avoid the comment-within-comment hacks, because they are ugly, and there is almost always a better way. Once you have a good knowledge of the quirks its not so bad.

Re:code to the standard

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Or use BrowserCam. For a small fee, they will provide screenshots of your site from all the major browsers on demand.