We all understand the importance of checking the website with multiple browsers, especially when we are designing a new layout for a website. This is the case even if we are writing validated standard code. The number of extant browsers we need to check with are enormous: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and so on with different versions. And then there are the different platforms: Windows, Macintosh (Mac), Linux, etc. The problem for most people is that multiple versions of certain browsers cannot co-exist with each other, the most notable example of this is IE for Windows. Unless you happened to have multiple computers, this presents a certain difficulty for the average webmaster. This article suggests some ways for you to run multiple versions of multiple browsers on one computer.
How to Run More than One Version of Internet Explorer on a Single Machine: Using a Virtual Machine
The official Microsoft-sanctioned method of testing with multiple versions of IE on one computer is to install a virtual machine.
Loosely speaking, virtual machine software allow you to run another copy of Windows within your existing version of Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD or whatever. The virtual machine software pretends to be a new computer, and Windows gets installed into a small space on your hard disk which the software uses to mimic an entire drive.
Microsoft has made Internet Explorer automatically update to the latest version (via Windows Update), chances are that more and more of your visitors will be using the latest version.
Unfortunately, you can’t install more than one version of IE. The bulk of IE’s code does not get installed into its own sub directory (or folder) but into Windows’ system directory. Although there have been unofficial solutions available for some time among the webmaster community for installing different versions of IE into the same Windows installation, there are various peculiarities in the end result, and the IE versions you get from that behave slightly differently from the standard versions when installed normally. If you feel you really need to test with old versions of IE, you should probably try one of the following methods.
How to Test on Linux Browsers
The default browser that comes on many Linux distributions is Firefox (although not necessarily so). However, you will find that even though Firefox tries to render your page the same way under all platforms, the fonts available under Linux are different from those available on Windows. If you don’t code your fonts in a cross-platform compatible way, your site may end up being rendered with an ugly font. For example, if your site only specifies “Arial” or “Impact” or some Windows-specific font, since these fonts are not available by default under non-Windows systems, your site will be rendered using either the default font or some other font that the browser thinks matches what you’ve specified.
If you don’t want to bother to run Linux to test, be sure that you at least:
Test your pages under Firefox for your platform.
Specify alternative fonts for your web pages. For example, don’t just select a font like “Arial” in your design. Specify alternatives as well, should Arial not be available, like “Helvetica” and a final fallback, something generic like “sans-serif”.
How to Test Mac Browsers
Nowadays, you don’t actually need a Mac to test Mac browsers, since the default Mac web browser, Safari, and alternative browsers like Firefox and Vivaldi have Windows equivalents.
I’m not sure if Safari for Windows displays things identically with Safari for Mac OS X. However, I think that for the most part, where my sites are concerned, the way they render things is sufficiently alike that I don’t need to bother with specially getting a Mac just to test the sites.
Conclusion
It’s a good idea to test your site with multiple versions of multiple browsers, particularly if you plan to do anything fancy with style sheets on your site. This doesn’t mean that you have to support all browsers. However, when you are able to test your pages this way, you can at least reduce the number of problems your pages have with the different browsers. The tips in this article allow you to test with multiple browsers even if you have only one machine.