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I'm nearing the publication of my site, and I'm wondering what everyone else uses to check their sites cross-browser (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, IE (7, 8, 9))? Is there some sort of all-in-one program, or do you just install all those browsers?

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I use the QA guy. :) – greyfade May 13 '11 at 21:04
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Lynx. If it worked there, it should work everywhere. – David Thornley May 13 '11 at 21:09
@David: the websites I develop are tested on Lynx by a fellow colleague of mine... unfortunately it may test the html part of the site, but clients now expect slick interfaces and you need css/JavaScript there. – Matthieu M. May 14 '11 at 14:56
@Matthieu M.: I figure it's a nice easy way to see how it will look to a search engine and to a screen reader. It's nice to know, although even my web pages look better with a more conventional browser. – David Thornley May 15 '11 at 19:34
@David: I agree. Also, it makes you focus a bit more on the html "purity" rather than having a heap of tags. – Matthieu M. May 16 '11 at 6:16

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11 Answers

up vote 9 down vote

IE 6, 8, 9, Firefox 3, 4 and Chrome.

Edit: I have the browsers running in VMs, keeps them out the way, just boot them up when I need them, Parallels on the Mac and XP mode on Windows.

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Thanks, but I edited my question to be more clear – mattcurtis May 7 '11 at 16:18
+1, unfortunately there isn't much to do but install and test in browser. – Wyatt Barnett May 7 '11 at 18:38
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+1, virtual machines is the way to go for IE, sadly. I've heard complaints from front-end developers I've worked with of cross-browser bugs that didn't show up in think like MultipleIEs but did show up in a "real" IE6 or IE7. – Carson63000 May 7 '11 at 22:28
From what I have heard MultipleIEs doesn't use the IE6 engine, kinda fudges it with IE7, not sure if it is true but either way best to always go native. – G3D May 7 '11 at 23:57
@G3D if anybody can substantiate that claim (that MultipleIEs is not faithful) I'd love to know about it: stackoverflow.com/questions/2859010/… – Yar May 14 '11 at 6:29
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up vote 7 down vote

There are many services out there that will help you out with cross-browser testing.

If you just want to see what things look like in different browsers without spending any money, you can give Browser Shots a try. For interactive testing, there are services like Cross-Browser Testing.

While searching for answers to this, I came across this article that reviews several different services and compares them based on price and features.

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up vote 6 down vote

You might also want to try Adobe BrowserLab. I've also used a program called MultipleIEs. It allowed me to install multiple versions of IE on my Win XP machine. That was a while ago, but it worked well. And I agree with Anna that Browser Shots is a nice free solution.

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up vote 2 down vote

As noted, you really can't do much save install browsers and test site using them. Stuff like browsershots and all was a godsend 5 years ago when you were just dealing with visual bugs, but these days nearly any application -- and your major testing surface -- is interactivity not design.

Now, all that said, you can automate some of this, at least on select platforms -- check out slenium and selenium RC; that will let you create an automated test suite for firefox. Now, does that cover all fronts? No. But having an automated testing shot at all is better than most. And you can at least confine your painful, manual browser testing to a working application.

Insofar as which browsers to test, I would spend more time on mobile safarai and other webkit than on desktop IE at this point.

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up vote 2 down vote

I use:

  • BrowserLab for static page views
  • IE 9 for IE 7-9 testing (with in-built Developer tools), AND IETester, because sometimes things appear differently between the two methods, plus IETester lets you test in IE 6 if you're still aiming for compatibility there
  • Firefox and SRWare Iron for testing in Mozilla and Chrome environments, respectively
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+1 for IETester. Good app, used it for years now, but a bit unstable on my new Win7 machine. – Graham May 19 '11 at 13:31
up vote 2 down vote

Multiple VMs with native browsers, running automatic testing via Selenium RC.

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up vote 1 down vote

Adobe made a very good service too,

try it at https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html

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up vote 1 down vote

If you don't want to install all browsers (or use virtual machines) maybe BrowseEmAll could be a solution for you?

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up vote 0 down vote

I have them all installed:

IE 8 (Natively)

IE Tester (8,7,6)

Chrome

Firefox

Opera

Safari

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IE Tester can be rather unreliable. – sevenseacat May 14 '11 at 9:15
up vote 0 down vote

That depends on your audience. Is your site targeting any group in particular? (Corporate, older, younger, mobile, touch-screen ...) Corporate browser choices can be several years behind the times, depending on the size of the company and the speed at which change occurs ... inexperienced users may have only the browser(s) initially installed on their computers, even if that means IE 6 or Netscape Navigator or whatever.

For a casual site, it may be enough simply to install the most recent version of a few browsers and leave it at that; you can probably do that directly on your development machine. Beyond that, you're probably going to have to use tools of one sort or another, but remember that there are always catches to simulators. (Of course, the flip side to that is that those catches may only apply to 0.1% or 0.001% or 0.00001% of your target audience, so maybe it doesn't matter that Service X doesn't emulate IE 6 on Windows XP perfectly.)

Mobile and touch-screen devices may require simulators anyway unless you plan on buying a wide variety of devices (or getting your company to buy them). In some cases, you may simply have to post a disclaimer saying that the site is best experienced in (browser list goes here) ...

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up vote 0 down vote

We used selenium , and wrote code that will take a screenshot of every page and pastes it in a document .

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