[Web4lib] Browsers to test

Keven keven.jeffery at gmail.com
Tue May 29 14:05:02 EDT 2007


I've found a free test account at http://www.browserpool.com to be very 
useful for testing.

Keven

Thomas Dowling wrote:
> On 5/29/2007 12:36 PM, Nancy E. Sosna Bohm wrote:
>
>   
>> In what versions of browsers should an academic website display with all of
>> its design features intact? 
>> For example, in NS4 a page might not be laid out as intended, though the
>> elements are all present and functional.
>> But should a page look identical in, say, Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 1.0.7 ?
>>
>>     
>
>
> You've got to get beyond the idea that any page should look "identical"
> for any two users, let alone any two browsers.
>
> Coupla thoughts off the top of my head:
>
> Validate your markup and CSS, and check for any unexpected hiccups in
> current versions of IE, Firefox, and Safari.
>
> Test with a screen reader, or in Lynx as a reasonable approximation.
> (Or Opera with all images and styles turned off, or Firefox with the Web
> Developer add-on set likewise, etc.).
>
> Test with a tool like <http://colorfilter.wicklin.org/> or drop
> screenshots into a photo editor and see what they look like in greyscale.
>
> Drop a screenshot into a photo editor, blur the picture, and see if you
> can still make sense of the page structure.  (That is, is top-level
> navigation and main link structure comprehensible at a glance without
> forcing the user to read?)
>
> Test on a high-resolution screen with Firefox set to enforce a minimum
> font size of, say, 12px.
>
> Test with scripting turned off.
>
> If your stylesheet is tricked out to optimize display of Verdana, test
> on a machine that doesn't have Verdana.
>
> Test in a 750-px wide window and a 1500-px wide window.  Test on a cell
> phone or PDA.
>
>
>   



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