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Browser compatibility
Written by Tyme White on October 12, 2006
Does your site look right in all browsers? Did you check? Designers do this by habit so this tip isn’t for you. This tip is for people who use templates. I’m going to let you in on a secret.
Just because a template looks good or can be downloaded doesn’t mean the person that designed it checked it across multiple browsers.
Many times the person designing is just learning and doesn’t think to check. It looks good in the browser he/she is using, that’s all that matters right? Wrong. On the flip side new writers might attempt to tweak a template that works fine and accidentally break it in other browsers.
9rules readers use all types of browsers and I have to think of their experience when making determinations. If I surf a site and the design looks one way in Internet Explorer and another in Firefox due to the large number of submissions I do not have the time to send the writer a note then revisit when the problem is corrected. A large number of people will redesign their site prior to submitting and in the haste of getting the design done, might not do the browser checks…so…you’ve been warned. 
The best content in the world won’t be read if the page is borked. So take a minute and cross browser check your site.
October 12th, 2006 at 8:48 am
I always check my site in both IE and Firefox. Are there any other browsers that you would consider obligatory to check? Where should we draw the line? For example, a friend told me there were a couple quirks when he visited my site using Safari, but I don’t even know how to check that without a Mac.
October 12th, 2006 at 8:52 am
If you test in IE, FF, Opera and Safari you have 99.9% of the browser market covered, although depending in your site you may find you have more FF users than IE, or mre Safari users than FF (if it’s a Mac blog for example).
October 12th, 2006 at 10:08 am
If designers really did “do this by habit” then, since template authors are designers (at least in the loose sense of designer being someone who designs), there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
The real problem is two-fold. Firstly, some designers don’t bulletproof their designs: they don’t check cross-browser compatibility, or ensure that they degrade elegantly if images or CSS are turned off, or don’t check if and how they break if you bump up or reduce the font size (you have no idea how many people don’t manage that one!). Secondly, a lot of people customise those templates without quite knowing what they’re doing, and break things in various ways—I get a lot of these on Tarski‘s forum.
October 12th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Mac/IE5 is my arch nemesis.
October 12th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
@chris – dude, Mac/IE5 is a right pain, luckily you shouldn’t have to worry about it anymore, Microsoft has ended support on it, so it should be considered dead.
Anyway, we have bug testing for IE7 to be getting on with….
October 12th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
I know how important it is to check cross-browser compatability but I really don’t know how to do so. I know it validates and works fine in Firefox and IE7 but I can’t test anything else since I live in Vista. Has anyone found a way around this?
October 12th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Ummm. Okay. Six comments in and no one’s said HOW to do this. I’ll go for bait: how do you check? and worse, what do you do to fix the inconsistencies?
October 12th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Hey guys, if you don’t have access to either a Mac or a PC for testing in other browsers, head over to Browser Cam — a site that lets you see screenshots in multiple browsers and operating systems. Real useful
October 12th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Well, if you wanna have screenshots of your web design in different web browsers, than you may use this free service at : Browsershots . At the time of this writting, there are only a few types of browsers available, but normally, there are plently – probably the webmaster is doing some maintanance, not sure. But it is a really great service, plus it is free. Another thing, i have wrote an article inconjunction with this topic
– You may read it if you are interested 
: Read Article
October 12th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Having browser compatiblity is great, but in the end, there’s only so much you can do and people are still using I.E. …sigh…
October 13th, 2006 at 1:48 am
The two browsers to aim for are Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (unless yours is a specialty site like the aforementioned Mac blog.) That covers you for 99% of your site audience. If it works there, then it’ll generally work for Opera and Safari as well. The people who use the other browsers (like Konqueror, for instance) are generally aware that they are not going to see the web in the same way as anyone else. That’s a choice, and my site stats put that at fewer than 10 page views per year.
Basically, if your site is designed at all well, if it follows established web standards, if it uses only non-obtrusive scripting, then it will degrade well in any browser or platform–even text-only screen readers.
BTW, Browser.cam is a little on the pricey side–especially when BrowserShots.org is available for free.
October 13th, 2006 at 2:18 am
That browsershots.org thing is great! Even though it takes awhile, it’s pretty good for being free.
October 14th, 2006 at 8:33 am
As my windows-based desktop is invariable in a ‘state of crash,’ I write tygerland on either an iBook or PowerBook – no duo core yet for me
, so I post a request on the blog asking for confirmation – usually someone is surfing using IE (hiss, spit).
Of course if the whole site is unreadable, you’re left with emailing a friend who can check. Golden rule. Have friends.
October 15th, 2006 at 3:27 am
I normally check my site all the time, but currently I don’t have access to a windows pc, but when I do I check IE6, IE7 and FF is fine because that’s what I design in.
However, no matter what I design and no matter whether it works in IE6,7 I always have a browse happy message. Sometimes you can’t do things that you want in IE6 either, so it’s just tough luck in that case.
Luckily, for me only 8% of my visitors (not many in total either) use IE.
November 26th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
We have always checked our site between FF and IE (we do our coding on PCs), but we seem to have trouble with Safari and FF on the Mac. Everything looks find in FF on a PC, but then with FF on a Mac the fonts all take on a different size, and some objects in Safari (mainly our search button) loose the alignment. It is really confusing and even our Mac users can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.
Does anyone out there have any suggestions for how to troubleshoot Mac vs PC web-site rendering problems?