Freelance Web Design, Website Development & e-commerce Web Sites, Bristol, UK

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Cross-Browser Testing

Why is it important?

For various reasons which I'll not go into here I am a keen Firefox user. It's a good web browser. I recommend it.

Still today I come across web sites which don't work properly in Firefox. This is almost never the browser's fault but rather the fault of web designers and developers who only test their web sites on Internet Explorer, on some version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. For the web to be a truly global, accessible, platform-independent and browser-independent resource as is intended, it's so important that the web sites we create do not require the use of one specific browser on one specific operating system.

I single out Firefox as an example; but what about Safari Users on Apple Macs? and indeed Internet Explorer users on Apple Macs? (Under many circumstances IE on Mac operating systems behaves very differently to IE on Windows.)

For this reason I pay special attention to the testing of web sites I build on multiple browsers on different platforms. The table below shows the results of tests I've done on this website with regrard to full functionality of the site - correct rendering and correct operation of any dynamic features. I'm currently working on a Linux build for testing purposes and for general interest. Results of tests on Linux-based browsers will therefore come later.

Browser testing on this website

Browser	OS	Release Date
Lynx 2.8.5	Windows XP SP2	Unknown
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01	Windows XP SP2	Nov. 1997
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01	Windows XP SP2	Mar. 1999
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.23	Mac OS 10.3	Jul. 2002
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5	Windows XP SP2	Jul. 2000
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1	Windows XP SP2	Sep. 2002
Mozilla 1.7	Windows XP SP2	Unknown
Mozilla Camino 0.8	Mac OS 10.3	Unknown
Mozilla Firefox 0.8	Windows XP SP2	Unknown
Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3	Windows XP SP2	Unknown
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.1	Windows XP SP2	Oct. 2004
Netscape 4.x	Windows XP SP2	Jun. 1997
Netscape 6.01	Windows XP SP2	Nov. 2000
Netscape 6.1	Windows XP SP2	Aug. 2001
Netscape 6.2.2	Windows XP SP2	Oct. 2001
Netscape 7.0	Windows XP SP2	Aug. 2002
Netscape 7.1	Windows XP SP2	Jun. 2003
OmniWeb 5.0.1	Mac OS 10.3	Unknown
Opera 4.02	Windows XP SP2	Jun. 2000
Opera 5.0	Windows XP SP2	Dec. 2000
Opera 6.06	Windows XP SP2	Oct. 2002
Opera 7.23	Windows XP SP2	Sep. 2003
Safari 1.0.2	Mac OS 10.3	Unknown

Notes:

Do I test all the web sites I build on all the browsers listed Below? No. It takes a lot of time and patience to test a site on 24+ browsers. I tend to test the sites I create on the latest versions of IE Windows, IE Mac (of which development and support has ceased), Safari, Netscape and Firefox.

Many of the features on this site will not work well (if at all) on IE 4.01 and Netscape 4.x. This is due to poor/early DOM and CSS support. Relased pre 1998, these browsers fall in to my dinosaur category and as such I have no intention of supporting them.

See Brian Wilson's Browser Timelines for a comprehensive list of release dates for Windows IE, Macintosh IE, Netscape and Opera.