Browser Testing

[AsheSkyler]

When you try to make your site as cross-compatible as possible, how do you go about it with older versions of some browsers?
Do you use one of those sites that are supposed to email you screenshots after a certain amount of time after submitting your link?
Do you keep VMWare player or some kind of virtual OS around with old browsers installed on them?
Do you spend lots of time installing and uninstalling browsers? (And are quite possibly certified insane?)
Or something completely different?

My method is to keep everything up-to-date, except Internet Explorer. If IE wants to be a little troublemaker by default, I'll assign it as the "Default Busted Browser Checker" and see how badly something can go wrong without certain things supported. Most of my IE visitors use 8 anyway, so for now that's my other excuse to keep it around.

 

[Phreaddee]

http://utilu.com/IECollection/

That's all you need.
Older versions of ff, chrome & safari are not worth worrying about really, particularly ff and chrome you'll have to go back like 15 versions to see them as bad as ie9...

 

[Edge]

IE9 can be set to view as IE7 or IE8 using the developer tools. Otherwise I just test in Chrome, Firefox, iPad, iPhone, Samsung galaxy phone and Google Nexus.

 

[Frank]

In my experience, still having two XP machines with real and updated IE7 and IE8, there is no substitute for that. I have tried all other methods, but frequently they give false positive or negative results regarding aberrant rendering.

 

[chrishirst]

Or if you have a spare machine, run VirtualBox with a couple of XP VMs

 

[AsheSkyler]

If VirtualBox really is open source, I may make a permanent switch to it. VMWare was not easy to download when I had to have it for school. Open source stuff at least try to make it is bluntly obvious as possible how to get a copy of something.

 

[Phreaddee]

I couldn't tell you if its open source or not but its free. With Virtualbox I've been able to run multiple OS/browser combinations, all from the one machine.

you'll still need to source the OS's to run on it.
i've got three win virtual boxes 2xwin7 (running ie9 and ie10) and an xp box running 6,7 and 8. I've got a basic ubuntu set up and because I've clients using them, an OS9 and OSX10.4server box as well. if your running dual screens you can have your guest and host open at the same time, eg. production on the host, and then refresh the view in the guest. (if your testing ie).

 

[AsheSkyler]

Aye, it is. Or the last site I found it on says it was.

ITT Tech has me skittish of doing multiple virtual machines at once after three semesters of trying to run two Windows Server 2008 OS's at the same time on a computer with only 3GB RAM. Fun days, those were...