Browsers to account for?

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?

Mark

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?

mark

*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:



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.

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.

mark

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/

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 :-\

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.