Web Browser Testing

1 web browser is not enough

In the web design beginner tutorial I talked briefly about web browsers and browser incompatibilities.

Because your website visitors will be using different web browsers it would be fatal to just limit yourself to say Internet Explorer. According to the usage statistics chart more than 20% of your visitors are not using Internet Explorer and might possibly leave your page quickly if it has weird display bugs or errors in their web browsers.

If you don't want to lose visitors due to web browser bugs I strongly recommend that you download the most used browsers and test your pages in all of them every time before going live. The most important ones are:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Safari
• Opera

Because Internet Explorer (IE) is such a large player and usually the one acting weird it's a good idea to develop websites under Windows so that you can test them in IE (or get an emulator for doing it under Linux or Mac).

It's also good idea to make a web standards supporting browser such as Firefox your primary testing browser and then move from there to less standards compliant ones. If your pages work in a standards compliant web browser chances are they will also work in all other similar browsers. My usual testing routine consists of:

1. Making sure it works in Firefox
2. Double-checking in Safari and Opera (if it works in Firefox it usually works in Safari and Opera)
3. Testing it in IE and start fixing bugs (sad truth)

Let's start already?

If you've downloaded and installed some of the above web browsers and got hold of a programming editor you're ready to jump straight to the HTML tutorial. You can also continue with the remaining chapters if you need a quick introduction to PSPad or a guide to WAMP.