The ideal web browser for web-design
Posted: December 21st, 2005 | Author: dotblack | Filed under: Web-Browsers, Web-Design | 2 Comments »Whether you like IE or Fireforx , if you love Opera or just can’t stop using Safari , you have to choose one of these browsers as your standard browser for testing when you design with x-browser support or you’ll just end up testing on each browser on every CSS modification.
Morphing pretty images to structural markup
The design process started with a long enough checklist including branding, usability, find ability and compliance to standards. So the GUI or the website graphical layout is designed with all that in mind. Now it’s the time you take that beauty out of Photoshop and give it some jobs and some qualities. You HTML it. You write a proper structure for the layout and present the copy in a good arrangement according to your Information Architecture layout. You start CSSing to achieve what you designed in Photoshop in your web browser.
You press F12 in Dreamweaver
You’re partly done with some CSS work. So to satisfy your thirst for a visual treatment after some few minutes, you preview your work in your default browser. In most cases IE would be the default browser on Windows even though majority of designers turned to Firefox as we witness the badges on many blogs, and obviously Safari on Mac. But where should we start? Which browser should we take as our standard for testing. Why not pick our favorite and test against it, and then let’s say god will help–don’t do that!
It’s a modern talk!
We’re talking modern browsers; we’re cruising in a hood full of floating cars. DOM supporting browsers, CSS2 friendly, and now even XMLHTTPRequest. Cross browser (x-browser) compatibility is not an option anymore. It’s a must. So, how are we setting our pace to get there on time and on job? By having a rule of thumb that is having only one browser to test on. Once you’re done, test on the rest of the browsers on your list (the ones that most of your audience use, however you should consider all the people!). That way you don’t have to do an ad-hoc test on every refresh, instead you test on the rest of the browsers with an overall understanding of the differences; not forgetting to reset browser CSS defaults & using JS abstraction layers.
So which browser would you go with?
Fox rains a 3 pointer, he’s on Fire!
I’m an Opera fan on Windows. I adore Safari on my new Tiger. I still miss my IE that I ditched after being charmed by Tabbing and RSS support in Opera. So, I ain’t no biased and no promoter for sure.
Why Firefox? imma show you the money now!
The list of browsers and their different versions is a long one. It’s going to be appended by new ones as we go forward. How many are we going to have on Web3.0 era? My short listed browsers are shown below and I’ll explain why Firefox.
Slashing Safari & Konqueror
Safari, the default browser on Mac OS is a classy browser with all means. Supports all the goodies and renders CSS really in a smooth way. However, form controls are not editable in CSS and the look stays in tack with the OS theme. Konqueror the KDE ambassador runs the same unity game with KDE’s theme. Both being based on KHTML engine makes them both a special kind of browsers. Safari works on Mac OS and Konqueror on Linux running KDE shell. They’re not universal (portable) on the OS domain.
Opera hosts Pavarotti, not my testing
Opera ships with great themes & functions, oh okay let’s get back to slashing it. Again it has it’s own implementation of form control look and feel. Active-x objects are not supported. Weak on Active-x and XMLHTTPRequest. Even though Opera is one of the browsers that is portable on many platforms it’s still not a browser that helps in debugging. It’s got the different modes of viewing and zooming and the rest of the goodies including toggling images, and textual view. It’s a good one to consider but won’t be good enough to take as a standard judging baldy.
IE’s out of shape for now
Even with the updates and the promises for supporting the web dev communities by donating a Developer Toolbar it’s still out of the game for many of the bugs in the rendering engine for CSS. Until IE 7.0 is final let’s keep IE out. Let’s not forget that IE is good on Windows. It is really not even close to a web browser on Mac! It doesn’t even have a place in Linux (you wouldn’t use Virtual PC to run Linux and then run WinE to run IE would you?). But hey, it’s the most popular browser and a market dominator! Respect.
Firefox is the ideal testing browser
One happy family. Mozilla (gecko) browsers; Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape Navigator are all cross OS browsers based on the same base engine with different implementations. So by using Firefox we’re actually testing on 3 brands of browsers.
One of the most important qualities of Firefox is the level portability across OSes. It’s as if Firefox builders (Mozilla) are aiming for winning the standard-browser title all the way. Form controls implementation and CSS unity over OSes is an amazing part of Firefox for testing. Developer extensions are the most powerful additions to Firefox that makes it simple to debug on it. JavaScript console is another built-in feature.
It’s available on any OS you wish. Windows got it, Mac enjoys it, Linux Dist’s? most of them have it!
Done testing on Firefox. Now what?
Once you’re done on Firefox it’s your turn to start testing on Win IE. Once you’re done you’re mostly done with all the other browsers too! Only little fixes might catch you if you didn’t reset all the browsers’ defaults, even that are a minor change that you must have to do. After test on Firefox and IE you’re %98 done so to speak. The rest would be just a pixel or two misaligning or a font shift here and there. You’re just ready to after testing. If you used a proper JS abstraction layer such as Prototype then you’d be good to go for AJaX too.
Share your experience.
Related posts:
- Webkit is everywhere
- IE7 replacing my FF
- New version: Happy users & Sad Designers
- Opera 8.6 and Minimo show down
- IE tabbed browsing with MSN toolbar
I use a different method. I test on IE when I design on Win and test on Safari when on Mac. I end testing on Firefox to standardize my design. I’d simply ignoe Opera and Camino.
you want test on every browser. that is crazy