Browser Testing

Don G wrote:

If you can get your hands on a Mac, use that for testing as well. I
was given a 4 year-old Mac, and I was amazed at how messed up 2 of my
sites were when viewed in IE for Mac and Netscape/Mozilla for Mac.

Interesting... I don't suppose anyone has any clue as to why the
rendering for the same program would be different between the Mac and
the PC version.

Because it's not the same program. It's a Mac program and a Windows
program both of which Microsoft labelzed "Internet Explorer".

On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:04:50 -0500, Don G <mail4dag (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:

I currently have IE6 and Firefox installed on my machine, and I switch
between the two when testing web sites I am working on. It is my
understanding that IE5 is still pretty common. Is this correct? Should
I be testing my web site with IE5 as well?

Depends a bit on what your site is, but probably for now, yes. At least
to make sure the site is readable. I wouldn't worry about getting the
layout beautiful. Note that 5.5 and 5.0 are rather different. 5.0 makes
a pig's ear of CSS, 5.5 manages to get a bit more of it right.

But note also that there is no single browser called IE 6.0. There is a
host of browsers calling themselves IE 6.0, all with a different set of
bugs. I've had a page which looked fine in my copy of IE 6.0 display two
different bugs in the browsers used by two colleagues, both of which
also claimed to be IE 6.0.

If so, does anyone know
where I might be able to download a copy?

http://browsers.evolt.org/

Is it possible to install IE5 on a machine with IE6?

According to Microsoft no, but some genius did find a way of doing it,
and I've got IE 6, IE 5.5 and IE 5.0 all on my machine. Unfortunately
I've now lost the link to the method of doing it, but a bit of googling
on the c.i.w.a.* hierarchy should find it.

I know that there are many browsers out there, and that each has it's
own quirks, but are the differences significant enough to merit
installing one or more additional alternate browsers?

Yes.

If so, which
browser(s) would you recommend testing with?

Opera; if possible Safari on the Mac. At least one text browser, though
you could use one of the Opera styles which does a good imitation of
that. I suspect IE 5.2 on the Mac can probably be ignored by now, but I
could be wrong.

If wide readability is important to you, you probably should check the
site is readable in Netscape 4, which still clings on in certain corners
of the Web, but don't bother about making it look good there. That way
lies madness.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Don G wrote:

I assumed that IE for Mac was simply a port of IE for Windows.

Absolutely not. Totally independent implementation.

Stephen Poley wrote:

On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:04:50 -0500, Don G <mail4dag (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:

According to Microsoft no, but some genius did find a way of doing it,
and I've got IE 6, IE 5.5 and IE 5.0 all on my machine. Unfortunately
I've now lost the link to the method of doing it, but a bit of googling
on the c.i.w.a.* hierarchy should find it.

http://labs.insert-title.com/labs/article795.aspx

"Don G" <mail4dag (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

If you can get your hands on a Mac, use that for testing as well. I was
given a 4 year-old Mac, and I was amazed at how messed up 2 of my sites
were when viewed in IE for Mac and Netscape/Mozilla for Mac.

Interesting... I don't suppose anyone has any clue as to why the
rendering for the same program would be different between the Mac and
the PC version.

Actually, and contrary to popular belief, it's just that they are not the
same version. You can very well implement the same functionality regardless
of the platform you are working on (although that might take considerable
efforts). But ie on mac just isn't the same version as ie on windows,
regardless of them having a same version number...
--

Rudy
http://www.rol.be
--
Toon mij een cynicus en ik toon u een teleurgestelde idealist.

Don

"Don G" <mail4dag (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

I can greatly recommend Opera[1]. Not only is it _the_ most standards
compliant browser for Windows afaik, ...

How different is Opera's rendering from Firefox's? I am just getting
started, so I would like to keep things as simple as possible for the
time being. If the differences are significant, then I will need to
check it out though.

... it also gives you a box full of 'browsers' to play with. It has all
sort of views, like emulating a text browser or a browser with large
letters or high contrast.

These sounds like an interesting and useful features. I might end up
checking Opera out just for these features.

only thing is, it's not free :-)
Well, you have a banner if you don't pay, that is :-)

Rudy

Thanks,

Don

"Don G" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design:

If you can get your hands on a Mac, use that for testing as well. I was
given a 4 year-old Mac, and I was amazed at how messed up 2 of my sites
were when viewed in IE for Mac and Netscape/Mozilla for Mac.

Interesting... I don't suppose anyone has any clue as to why the
rendering for the same program would be different between the Mac and
the PC version.

IIRC, they're "the same program" only in name. My understanding is
that Mac IE5 and Windows IE5 were different code bases.

By the way, to answer another of your questions, I've been told
that you can't have two releases of IE on the same machine if one
of them is IE6. I haven't tested that myself.

As always, you should test in Lynx or another character-based
browser, and you should validate every page.


--

Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/

Previously in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets,alt.html,comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.site-design,
Stan Brown <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> said:

IIRC, they're "the same program" only in name. My understanding is
that Mac IE5 and Windows IE5 were different code bases.

More than that - they use completely different rendering engines.

By the way, to answer another of your questions, I've been told
that you can't have two releases of IE on the same machine if one
of them is IE6. I haven't tested that myself.

Depends who you ask. I have IE 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6 all installed on
this machine here. It does have a few strange side-effects, but nothing
major - good enough for testing.

--
Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au

Harlan Messinger wrote:

Stephen Poley wrote:

On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:04:50 -0500, Don G <mail4dag (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:

According to Microsoft no, but some genius did find a way of doing it,
and I've got IE 6, IE 5.5 and IE 5.0 all on my machine. Unfortunately
I've now lost the link to the method of doing it, but a bit of googling
on the c.i.w.a.* hierarchy should find it.


http://labs.insert-title.com/labs/article795.aspx

That is the link and the instructions work, I just added MSIE 4.0 (from
an old Win98SE Disk) and MSIE 5.01 (from my Win2K). All working with
MSIE 6.0.2 on my Win2K box. Will add 5.5 as soon as I locate a cd with it.

The article does not list the files required for 4.0, but I got it to
work with just these...

IEXPLORE.EXE
INETCPL.CPL
JSCRIPT.DLL
MSHTML.DLL
SHDOCVW.DLL
URLMON.DLL
VBSCRIPT.DLL
iexplore.exe.local (The zero byte file you create)


--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Previously in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets,alt.html,comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.site-design,
"Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art (AT) centralva (DOT) net> said:

That is the link and the instructions work, I just added MSIE 4.0 (from
an old Win98SE Disk) and MSIE 5.01 (from my Win2K). All working with
MSIE 6.0.2 on my Win2K box. Will add 5.5 as soon as I locate a cd with it.

Or you can download them (just the necessary files) from
http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

--
Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au