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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.)"
Oh, very much not true. Webkit (either Chrome or Safari, take your pick) and Gecko render things very differently. Especially in regard to fonts. Not even Chrome and Safari render fonts the same way.
There's also some weirdness related to boxes, but that should come as no surprise to anyone.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
That's no argument against the fact that presuming that, as per your example (which GP didn't give),
- Arial IS available
- The user IS NOT overriding the document style
- The window size etc. IS the same (or the website is presented in a fixed-width format to begin with)
things still do not render the same even between browsers that supposedly use the same engines.
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. Either the browser renders it exactly the way as specced, or it doesn't follow the spec. Sounds simple enough, but apparently as long as you just do things 'close enough', you're standards-compliant.
Doesn't take away that IE is indeed, by far, the worst of the bunch (IE/FF/Opera/Safari/Chrome), but to dismiss the fact that there are differences between even the 'standards-compliant' engines/browsers as "well they're just minor differences" (as per your sibling poster) or "you probably just didn't design your site right" is a bit silly
Adobe did a demo of their next Dreamweaver release last fall at their Adobe Max conference. Similar feature there, except a bit better. Using a render farm your page is rendered in pretty much every browser, on each OS (rather than just what you have installed), including the "Onion Skin" feature shown in Expression Web. They even used the same name for the feature.
paul reinheimer