Web site cross-browser testing in Practice

Question

I'm looking for resources/suggestions on real world cross-browser web site testing. In this case the emphasis is on simple web content rather than javascript/AJAX or a server side applications. I've looked at the web stats & made a list of the highest-used browsers. Then what?

For example, I'd love to hear experiences with:

• Is there a rule of thumb of browser equivalents? For example, my feeling is FireFox Mac vs. PC renders very much the same and IE Mac vs. PC do not. Chome and Safari (PC and Mac) use WebKit, so they should render the same, correct?

• Do you need to test on an actual Mac or is PC FireFox/Safari/Chrome etc enough?

• Getting multiple browser versions to work on the same machine without too much registry hacking.

• Using VMWare/VirtualPC (do you have to buy a copy of Windows to activate each?) How time consuming is it to set up? (I'm on a PC, btw).

• Using http://browsershots.org in practice on a large number of web pages (1000+)

• Anyone know of a HTML/CSS scanning tool that will flush out common problems, such as box model width issues?

Thanks!

Answer 1

At work, we use VirtualPC to test different versions of IE (6 and 7) on XP and Vista as MS provides VPC images of these for use by developers. The images are good for 3 months at a time, if I remember correctly, and are free to download. They are large downloads but quick to set up. For us this solves the problem of registry hacking for differing versions. MS VPC images

FF is relatively easy as we run FF2 and FF3 side by side on a Windows install (search for the profile switch). We use a LiveCD for FF Linux testing. We do run Safari and Chrome on Windows for our pseudo Mac tests (our main site is not open to the general public and we don't have a Mac user - yet).

We basically develop in FF, test in IE6 and IE7 on Windows until we get to the staging server, then we start hitting with the different browsers to see if we notice any issues. We validate with the W3C tools and try to stay 100% standards compliant which we hope will help us not have browser issues on alternative platforms.

Answer 2

I tend to just test on IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3, Safari, Chrome, Opera all on PC. These browsers will cover about 98% of the market. I assume FF and Safari are same on Mac and PC. I tend to use VirtualBox to have an IE6 install. I also use browsershots occasionally but not sure it is all that useful.

Answer 3

Yet another option would be BrowserSeal. Since it is an application and not a web service, it is much faster compared to pretty much everything else.