[Web4lib] Browsers to test

[Andrew Stevens]

Nancy E. Sosna Bohm wrote:
> In what versions of browsers should an academic website display with all of
> its design features intact? 

The list that I'd aim for is:
IE 5 (both mac and win), 6, and 7
Opera 9
Safari (latest version)
Konqueror (latest version)
Gecko 1.7 (Firefox 1), 1.8 (Firefox 1.5), 1.8.1 (Firefox 2), and 1.9
(Firefox 3). Other recent gecko-based browsers out there will be using
one of these versions as well.

Perhaps the most important browser to design for is the one that hasn't 
been released.  Producing good, valid markup and minimizing the number 
of hacks used will do much to ensure that pages will be rendered by 
future viewing devices.

> But should a page look identical in, say, Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 1.0.7 ?

The vast majority of pages will be rendered identically in these 2
versions of Firefox.  As noted above, these 2 releases employ different
versions of the gecko layout engine, so there are some differences, but
they are relatively minor.

More on the differences between the releases can be found at:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_1.5
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_2
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_3
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/ (not updated in a while,
but still a nice resource)

Thomas Dowling wrote:
> You've got to get beyond the idea that any page should look "identical"
> for any two users, let alone any two browsers.

This is some of the best advice you'll ever get.  Trying to make pages 
look identical in all browsers is a sure recipe for accelerated graying 
of hair.  An old, but still valid, article that a good read is:

A List Apart: A Dao of Web Design
<http://alistapart.com/articles/dao/>