Browsers to account for?

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Post January 30th, 2004, 10:21 am

When testing your site to make sure it's displaying, what are the major browsers one should use? I have:

IE 6.x
Netscape 7.x
Opera 7.x
Mozilla 1.7

Are there any other major ones out there?

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Post January 30th, 2004, 10:21 am

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Post January 30th, 2004, 10:50 am

THat's pretty much it, but don't forget the MAC population out there. ;)
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Post January 30th, 2004, 3:26 pm

UNFLUX wrote:
THat's pretty much it, but don't forget the MAC population out there. ;)


hmmm, good point. how could i test a site for mac "compliancy" without having access to a mac myself? is there some sort of emulator available for windows?

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Post January 30th, 2004, 3:53 pm

*sighs
Google Search = "macintosh browsers"
2nd result: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/ref ... x_mac.html

(There's plenty more to read on that Google search than just that link, but that will get you started.)


You can probably be certain that a fair amount of OS X users are probably using Apple's own Safari. Here's what Apple has to say about Safari's ability to render pages according to standards:

Quote:
Precision layout
Rest assured, Safari renders Web pages properly according to the latest Internet standards. So pages that use advanced HTML, XML, XHTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript and Java specifications just look right. And of course you can view the content in QuickTime, Flash and Shockwave plug-ins. Going beyond standard accuracy, pages in Safari look beautiful, thanks to fully anti-aliased text. Safari takes advantage of Jaguar’s rich support for Unicode, which lets you view sites in different writing systems, such as English and other Roman languages, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew or Arabic — even on the same page.


Read more here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/

Google search = n/a
I always say, if you know who manufactures a product, check with them first before spinning your wheels.
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Post January 30th, 2004, 3:55 pm

There's a neat site called Browser Cam that will allow you to test your pages on many different OS/browser combinations and show you screenshots of the results. It's not a free service, but they do offer a free trial.
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Post January 31st, 2004, 5:13 pm

RichB wrote:
There's a neat site called Browser Cam that will allow you to test your pages on many different OS/browser combinations and show you screenshots of the results. It's not a free service, but they do offer a free trial.


That is a neat site. I like that idea a lot (probably why they made the business, eh?) I don't think i can justify the $40 a month just on a hobby site though.

ATNO/TW, I guess I don't entirely understand your post. I know Mac has their own browsers. I just don't know how I could test pages in Mac browsers without access to a Mac. Charts with features are nice, but it's just not the same as seeing it in real time. For instance, both explorer and navigator support DHTML according to those charts, but the menus on my site behave differently in the two browsers.

Safari won't run on a Windows system, will it? I am completely Mac illiterate though, so there may be a way to do it that I just don't know about. I checked out the safari download site at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/safari.html and it doesn't look like there's a windows version. I guess I'm not going to lose too much sleep over it though. I think if one gets a site to work in explorer and navigator, most of the bases have been covered.

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Post January 31st, 2004, 5:26 pm

I think what ATNO/TW means is that if you stick to the standards your page should render ok in safari.

You can validate your html at:
http://validator.w3.org/

And your CSS at:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
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Post January 31st, 2004, 5:26 pm

Sorry I didn't make it clear. Mac uses IE and NS, and Safari is standards compliant. If I read things correctly, probably more-so. The point was if you code to standards it will display as intended as RichB just stated.
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Post February 1st, 2004, 10:58 am

When I code my sites, I make sure they work in Netscape first... since Netscape is more strict in the code than IE (IE likes to let things slip by the cracks and has a bunch of CSS that is for IE only). Pretty much if your site works in Netscape, you shouldn't have much (if any) problems in any other browser since NS is standards compliant.
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Post February 1st, 2004, 11:17 am

Agreed with lostinbeta. You can probably extend that to Mozilla/Firebird. My experience also is Opera is probably the most "picky" about standards.
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Post February 1st, 2004, 11:34 am

ATNO/TW wrote:
Agreed with lostinbeta. You can probably extend that to Mozilla/Firebird. My experience also is Opera is probably the most "picky" about standards.


Well Mozilla and Firebird both run off of the Gecko engine, which is what powers Netscape. So if it works in NS it will work in those (and vice versa).
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Post February 1st, 2004, 11:41 am

Yep -- sorta what I was saying. Opera is a refined Mozilla-based browser, too correct? Just curious for conversation sake (because I've never been able to follow it entirely) -- I was always under the impression that the "Gecko engine" was AOL/Netscape's version of Mozilla. I'm curious to bring this up, because, Netscape's Gecko obviously runs off the J2re, whereas Firebird does not.

//Added note to make sure I have some things correct. Mozilla and Netscape both use J2re, correct? However, Firebird was based off the Phoenix project and doesn't. It appears to me that Opera resembles Firebird more than Mozilla/Netscape.
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Post February 1st, 2004, 11:59 am

As far as I know Mozilla, Firebird, and Netscape 6+ are all based on builds of the Gecko engine, and Opera uses its own rendering engine.
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Post February 1st, 2004, 12:35 pm

Yeah, I believe Opera does use it's own engine... which actually makes it harder for cross browser coding. I know with a redirect script that I wrote for browser redirection, I had to check if the browser was Opera first otherwise it would return that it was Internet Explorer... which obviously isn't correct.

I personally am not a fan of Opera at all :-\
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Post February 1st, 2004, 12:51 pm

They seem to be deliberately trying to allow uses to get around browser detection in the latest version of Opera by giving them a choice of user agent strings. Actually, I'm not entirely sure this is something new, since I didn't really pay much attention to Opera before version 7.

As an addendum, I don't think any are dependent on the J2RE, but I think it may have been bundled with NE6, which used the Java 2 plug-in for java applets instead of Netscape's older built-in java runtime.
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Post February 1st, 2004, 12:51 pm

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