[Tigglet]

Hi,

This is one for the web designers... when producing a website it seems virtually impossible to accommodate all the different browsers - e.g. Internet Explorer, FireFox, Netscape etc. So, if you get something looking perfect in IE7 and FF, you can almost expect that it will look wrong in IE 6 or Netscape! Likewise, it may look fine on a laptop or PC but try it on a Mac and it looks totally wrong. Therefore, do you just optimise the sites for the most popular browsers and computers? Surely you can't please everyone!

[Jeewhizz]

It's a mindfield. Here's what we do:

Design the site to work in FF on both PC & Mac. Once it's working in FF, it generally works fine in Safari & Opera.
We then open it up in IE 7, and tweak it. This is generally minor tweaks
We then have a big drink and open it in IE 6. It's usually awful. So we do an IE 6 specific stylesheet to over-ride what bits we need to get it looking good.

IE6 is the bane of our lives. We would be better off without it

[Tigglet]

Thanks Khalid.

well that's fine if you have a Mac to test it on, but if you have built a website yourself and don't have a Mac then it is a very big expense to go to! sorry Mac users, you'll just have to get a PC!

[Jeewhizz]

You could try something like http://www.browsercam.com/Default2.aspx

[Tigglet]

Thanks. I will have a look at that later.

[glencooley.com]

Originally Posted by Tigglet

Hi,

This is one for the web designers... when producing a website it seems virtually impossible to accommodate all the different browsers - e.g. Internet Explorer, FireFox, Netscape etc. So, if you get something looking perfect in IE7 and FF, you can almost expect that it will look wrong in IE 6 or Netscape! Likewise, it may look fine on a laptop or PC but try it on a Mac and it looks totally wrong. Therefore, do you just optimise the sites for the most popular browsers and computers? Surely you can't please everyone!

You definately can't please all the different browsers/people out there.

What I try to do is keep the pages semantically correct and minimise the use of positioned divs. All basic div based design works generally ok and degrades nicely to text only browser its when you start mixing things like box model elements and floated elements that the real problems start.

Not one of the browsers out there is not without the little idiosyncrisities like line heights differing or IE calculating margin outside of the box model.

The main this is to ensure the widest support try and keep it as simple as possible interms of using CSS and layout.

2p

[tommy]

I agree with Glen and Khalid,

Especially with the design process, start with FF once its perfect in there then make it work in IE with IE specific CSS

I use multiple IE so I can run IE 5,5.5,6,7 but as the beta of IE 8 is out now I am turning to VM (Virtual machines) for IE's and the latest version of FF 3 Beta Release 4 all at different resolutions (well the lowest mainly)

[RayB]

I'll move this to the brand new web design section

[Flamin Fingers]

Cross Browser testing is always really fun. :|

I've got IE7, FF and Safari installed on Windows. I have Virtual machine running to check IE6. And if I need anything further than that I go for browsershots.

More often that not I use a different stylesheet for IE6. Dependent on the website ofcourse.

[glencooley.com]

Originally Posted by Flamin Fingers

Cross Browser testing is always really fun. :|

I've got IE7, FF and Safari installed on Windows. I have Virtual machine running to check IE6. And if I need anything further than that I go for browsershots.

More often that not I use a different stylesheet for IE6. Dependent on the website ofcourse.

Its really werid as I test in FF/IE6 and then VM in IE7.

But the only things I have found to be much of an issue are things like png support for IE6 which you have to hack around and a couple of css only multi tiered menus that i have done recently.