Microsoft's New Multiple-Browser Tester

Z80xxc! writes "Microsoft recently announced a new product called Expression Web SuperPreview, which lets developers view their web pages in any browser installed on their system, as well as in different versions of IE, all from the same interface. The product has one genuine innovation — a built-in tool for overlaying the rendering from one browser over another to compare (referred to as 'onion skins'). There are also HTML debugging aids and other helpful tools for web developers. A beta version is available for download. However, the current build only has support for IE — it will compare rendering in IE6 with either IE7 or IE8, whichever is installed. An internal build shows Firefox and Safari on Windows as well. The final product will appear as part of MS Expression Web Studio 3 when it is released later this year. (It will not be available in the Expression Mac suite.)"

Comments

Web standards

[nightglider28]

Tools like this, while helpful, should never have been necessary. If MS, owner of the dominant browser, wasn't among the poorest in W3C compatibility, stuff like this wouldn't be needed. Web pages should render the same in any browser, on any OS. The only difference should be in resolution.

Re:Web standards

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

As long as there are different rendering engines, things will look differently. The biggest problem is that you cannot have multiple versions of Internet explorer installed on the same computer.

Re:Web standards

[BenoitRen]

Every rendering engine that isn't Trident renders most things the same way, as long as the code is valid.

Re:Web standards

[RichardJenkins]

Layout should be identical amongst media types. Rendering differences (think: fonts available, widgets, text-only workstations etc.) are possible with two different systems adhering perfectly to standards.

Try telling that to a non-technical designer though :(

Re:Web standards

[moderatorrater]

The problem is that "most" isn't the target for high profile websites, they need to be as close to identical as possible. The assertion that cross browser testing only came about because of MS was just plain wrong. In fact, it could be argued that for a few years, cross browser testing wasn't necessary because of Microsoft since IE was the only browser with any significant market share.

Re:Web standards

[pizzach]

I have news for you: Ariel and Verdana are not always guaranteed to be available. People may even enlarge them or shrink them on your web page without your permission. Fonts are something you have to plan for when making web pages, though many nowadays don't. I HATE authors forcing font sizes smaller than I am comfortable with.

Re:Web standards

[AceofSpades19]

its called a virtual machine ;)

Re:Web standards

[causality]

No they don't. Not relative to the differences between Trident and most other engines.

There may be some differences, but they're nothing when compared to IE's awful rendering engine. Just look at the broken box model, or the hasLayout flag for example.

For around the last five years my Web design job has always revolved around making things look right in standards compliant browsers, then hacking for IE. Look at the code of most sites these days and you'll see an IE-specific style sheet.

Imagine the sum total of the economic cost to Web designers worldwide, if such a figure could be accurately assessed. I wonder just how large this number would be? To me this sort of unnecessary and deliberate incompatibility is very much like spam; it's a business practice that causes others to bear its costs. If the total cost to Web designers everywhere could be known, I really would have no problem with fining Microsoft for that amount, accompanied by the legal use of government police power to seize assets if this is necessary to pay the fine.

If that sounds drastic, I say that the only thing more absurd is the idea that we should have to put up with this kind of shit and shouldn't use any means available to discourage it, within the bounds of the law of course. I really believe that the only reason why Microsoft gets away with half of the things that they do is because of the general public's ignorance and lack of technical understanding. If not for that then I would expect at least some type of backlash against it, much like what Sony experienced due to their rootkit DRM.

Re:Web standards

[slimjim8094]

No no no no no.

That thought is breaking the Web.

HTML is a markup language. It was NEVER designed to give a pixel-picture representation of content. EVER. That would break mobile browsing, not to mention different resolutions, and everything else.

What you're looking for is called PDF, and it works great. That makes the guarantees you want - every pixel is in its proper place.

Too many designers, used to working in pamphlets where they had complete control, moved to web design. They just aren't the same!!

Re:Web standards

[indiechild]

Even PDFs with vector-based images and layouts render slightly differently on different platforms and different PDF viewers. I could hardly believe it myself when I saw the results.

The only thing you can trust is a bitmap image.

Re:Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

I lay much of the blame with the W3C. All that fuzziness with "A browser MIGHT display this as:" and "a browser MAY ...". All that has no place in 'strict' documents.

Please tell me how to achieve exactly no fuzziness with all the following setups:

* The young twenty-year old reading 10 pt font on a 1200x900 widescreen laptop monitor
* The old lady reading 30 pt font at increased DPI on an 800x600 resolution
* The secretary printing everything out on 8.5x11 or A4-sized paper
* The geek reading a web page in a 24x80 terminal
* The geek reading a web page on a 240x160 PDA screen

Here's how: you can't do it. The range of displays are simply too diverse. Even ignoring more exotic displays, you've always got major issues of resolution (16x9 or 4x3?), DPI (printed paper is not the same DPI as a screen!), and font face and size to worry about.

Re:Web standards

[Blakey Rat]

For around the last five years my Web design job has always revolved around making things look right in standards compliant browsers, then hacking for IE. Look at the code of most sites these days and you'll see an IE-specific style sheet.

Smart people code in the browser most of their customers use, then adapt that code for the other browsers. It's a lot easier that way around.

I'm not one of those "worship at the alter of web standards" people for two reasons:

1) I'd *much* rather have browser makers add features that benefit the 99% of the population who are end-users of the web, rather than the 1% of the population that are web developers.

2) The standards seem to have developed specifically to always do the *opposite* of whatever Microsoft chose to do. No doubt out of pure geek-rage instead of actual rational consideration. Take the text version of the property "innerHTML"... Microsoft quite reasonably calls it "innerText". The standards say it should be called "textContent." Why "textContent?" There's no "htmlContent"! Oh... right, because if they had called it "innerHTML" then Microsoft would have been saved some work. I swear the standards are written by people who are simultaneously head-in-the-clouds academics ("who needs columns on a website? It doesn't matter that CSS is shit at making columns, you should use it and not tables") and at the same time petulant children ("let's do it the way that IE doesn't do it!")

Age of the browser?

[benwaggoner]

Perhaps this is more an issue about Windows' dominance on managed corporate desktops.

IE6 is the version that gets most of the ire about compatibility. But the current version is IE8, which is quite standards compliant, and IE7 was much better in that regard than IE6.

Looking at the browser history timeline:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers

IE6 came out October 2001, the same month as Netscape 6.2, and the better part of a year before Mozilla 1.0 was released. Would Netscape 6.2 offer that much a better browsing experience for today's internet? Does anyone still regularly test sites against either?

How much of this is because non-IE browsers aren't commonly used in the enterprise, and thus older versions of them don't wind up deployed nearly as long?

Re:Browsershots

[ericlondaits]

I do web developing professionally and can say that a service with a 3 hour queue is only marginally useful. When your site has a rendering bug under some browser it takes quite a bit of trial and error while fiddling with CSS until you come up with a different way of expressing the same layout that is compatible across the board. IE6, particularly, has numerous rendering bugs that sometimes call for this "do the same, but differently" route and some bugs that require hacks to be put in place. While looking for the rendering bug you also need to find out what exactly is going on... for instance, IE6 will double an element's margin in some cases, but you need to find out which element first, which can be done with a bit more of fiddling with the CSS. ... So anything but an interactive solution is worthless in this cases. A service like browsershots is useful to check the state of a site, but once you find it has errors, you probably need something else.

I have a single VMWare VM with side-by-side installations of IE3 through 6, and IE7 in my main OS, along with Opera, Safari and Firefox.

Re:Browsershots

[wkurzius]

Do you also not mind waiting 45 minutes in between adding each ingredient?

Re:Ain't technology great?

[qw0ntum]

Every browser has quirks. Things render differently even between Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. As long as the rendering engine's source code is different and people are running the browser on different platforms, you're going to have differences in the way that pages are rendered, and that's just a fact of life. This tool makes it easier to spot differences in the way your code renders on different browsers. I'm not sure what your sarcasm is adding (dystopian future of calculators?) but given that differences will always exist between browsers this tool seems well-designed and helpful.

Re:Browsershots

[dmsuperman]

Not only that, but if the issue requires you to scroll or click to show you the bug then you're SOL. Personally I run a VM for IE6, a VM for IE7 (only because I've found MultipleIE to not always accurately represent what the end user uses), and Firefox in one of the VMs. I have outrageous amounts of RAM to play with, though. At work we have a couple fairly decent windows machines running remote desktop that the lot of us remote desktop into to view the pages, for the 15 or so of us it works quite well.

Re:Browsershots

[ericlondaits]

Just minutes ago I had to fix a bug where IE7 will place misterious bullets on "ul" elements which had the bullets removed through CSS... but the bullets only appear in some of the pages, and dissapear when you scroll or force a redraw of the browser (i.e. by minimizing and maximizing).

Browsershots is also useless when checking JS code, animation, DHTML and AJAX... which amounts to a good percentage of what I do.

Re:Let me rephrase

[AceofSpades19]

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE You would only need 1 windows xp vm, so you would probably only need 1 gig of ram for the virtual machine at most, which doesn't cost that much and 1 copy of windows xp which is only $150 at most I believe

Re:Browsershots

[Hannes2000]

This sounds like the first new MS product that's interested me in a while.

What a coincidence, that one of Microsofts more interesting products' sole purpose is ironing out their own fail :-)

Re:Browsershots

[FooBarWidget]

surely you are only going to submit your final work and not every single change that you make to your WIP

Actually, a web developer should and has to submit every single change. As a developer you'll want to catch cross-browser rendering differences early, instead of finding out after 2 months that the awesome design that you made works in Firefox and Opera (locally tested) but totally broken in IE with no way to fix it thanks to IE bugs.