Testing Your Website in Multiple Browsers

Monday, 03 December 2007

When designing websites, it is very important to check the results in multiple web browsers — something that looks fine in Internet Explorer may look disastrous in Firefox, and vice-versa. This problem is due to the different way in which each web browser interprets the HTML, XHTML and CSS standards, combined with any bugs that may be present. If you're designing a website, you have no control over which browser people will use to view it, so you need to ensure that your website displays acceptably in as many different browsers as possible.

The only way to know for sure how a website looks in a particular browser is to try it out. If you don't check it, how do you know you won't hit a bug or other display quirk? However, given the plethora of web browsers and operating systems out there, testing in all of them is just not practical, so you need to choose a subset. The question is: which subset?

Popular browsers

Thankfully, most people use one of a few "popular" browsers, but that's still quite a few. In my experience, on Windows, the most popular browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera, on Linux most people use Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape and on MacOS most people use Safari or Camino. Obviously, the relative proportions of users using each browser will vary depending on your website, and target niche — a website focused on non-technical users is far more likely to find users with Internet Explorer on Windows than anything else, whereas a website focused on linux kernel development will probably find the popular browser is Firefox on linux.

Which version?

It's all very well having identified a few popular browsers to use for testing, but an equally crucial aspect is which version of the browser to test. Users of Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, and recent versions of Netscape might be expected to upgrade frequently, whereas users of Internet Explorer might be far less likely to upgrade, especially if they are non technical (in which case they'll stick with the version that came with their PC). Checking the logs of some the websites I maintain shows that the vast majority of Firefox users (90+%) are using some variant of Firefox 2.0 (though there are a smattering all the way back to Firefox 0.5), whereas Internet Explorer users are divided between IE7 and IE6, with the ratio varying with the site.

Don't forget a text-only browser

A text only browser such as Lynx is ideal for seeing how your site will look to a search engine spider. Not only that, but certain screen reader applications will also give the same view to their users. Consequently, it's always worth checking with a text-only browser to ensure that your site is still usable without all the pretty visuals.

Multiple Browsers on the same machine

Having chosen your browsers and versions, the simplest way to test your sites is to install all the browsers on the same machine. That way, you can just open the windows side by side, and compare the results. Of course, you can't do this if the browsers run on different platforms, but one option there is to use virtual machines to test on multiple platforms with a single physical machine. Testing multiple versions of Internet Explorer can also be difficult, but TredoSoft have a nice little package called Multiple IEs which enables you to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same PC. Thanks to Multiple IEs, on my Windows XP machine I've got IE3, IE4.01, IE5.01, IE5.5, IE6 and IE7, as well as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Lynx!

Snapshot services

If you don't fancy installing lots of browsers yourself, or you don't have access to the desired target platform, you can always use one of the online snapshot services such as browsershots (free) or browsercam (paid). These provide you with the ability to take a snapshot of your website, as seen in a long list of browsers on a long list of platforms. Browsercam also provides remote access to the testing machines, so you can interact with your sites and check dynamic aspects, such as Javascript — something that's becoming increasingly more important as AJAX becomes more prevalent.

Posted by Anthony Williams
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Tags: testing, browsers, website, webdesign
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