Multiple versions of same browser on PC

Question

I am running Windows 7 on my machine. I have following web browsers installed:

• Opera
• Google Chrome
• Safari (windows version)
• Firefox 3.6
• IE 8

I am doing some development running on my local IIS web server and need to test my .net web application development cross browser. So I need to have older versions of the above browsers installed on my machine, eg IE7, Firefox 3 etc

What is the best approach for doing this? I have my doubts that different versions can co exist on same machine. Do I need to use a virtual pc? Or are there any applications available for such cross browser testing?

Answer 1

SuperPreview, part of Expression Web, may be useful for you. Also, there are websites out there that allow you to preview your website by looking at their remote server screens, basically. An example is http://crossbrowsertesting.com/. That way you don't have to try to install multiple versions of browsers on your own PC, which I have found quite difficult to do.

One other possibility is to get the free VMWare Player and set up several virtual machines, each with a different version of the browser you'd like to test with.

Edit:

You can install multiple versions of Firefox on the same PC side-by-side; that seems to work well. There are some third-party utilities to allow you to install multiple versions of IE, but when I tried that, they didn't work well and IE got all messed up on my PC.

Answer 2

As for Firefox and Chrome I'm not sure, but Safari I know will not allow you to "down-grade" and it will not allow two version to co-exist. The same issue with Internet Explorer, that you can not have two versions co-existing nor does it allow down-grades. My recommendation for ultimate compatibility testing is to have Virtual PCs running DOS (text-based, single-threaded application support), 3.1 (16-bit browser support), Windows 98 (32-bit MS-DOS support) and Windows XP (NTFS support).

On DOS run any browser you can find that actually works, 3.1 can run Internet Explorer 3, Windows 98 can run Internet Explorer 5 or 6. Windows XP can run Internet Explorer 7, then you have Internet Explorer 8 installed outside of your virtual machine.

As for testing Safari, if you want to test the original you need an old PowerPC. Find yourself an ancient Macintosh on eBay. You can test Safari 4 and Safari 5 on Windows XP or outside of your virtual machine. Since Safari 5 re-wrote the core engine for HTML 5 support and a new DOM-heavy javascript model it would be good to test in both. Safari 5 broke a LOT of websites.

For testing Chrome I don't actually think you'll need multiple versions. Google never changed the core engine and the browser isn't very old. Any chrome is just as good at rendering pages as the next. The only difference is how it handles settings, history, cache, etc.

For testing Firefox, I can't really help you. I don't know much about how it works or the core engine, but it's probably good to assume that the large version numbers (version 1 to version 2, as opposed to version 2.1 to 2.2) indicate a large change in the core engine. Try to put Firefox 2 on the Windows XP Virtual PC and run Firefox 3 outside your virtual box.

I also recommend using a text-based browser like Lynx outside of your virtual box. Any blind people who browse the web depend on text-to-speech software, and text-to-speech software usually acts on a page like it shows up in Lynx, not as it shows up in the HTML markup. It's good practice to always make sure your website makes sense in a text-based browser like this.

Then, as always, make sure your website validates. http://validator.w3.org

Answer 3

If you want to run all popular browsers without running virtual machines check this site: http://www.spoon.net/Browsers/

You can run simultaneously (each browser in its personal sandbox):

• IE 6,7,8,9
• Firefox 2,3,3.5,3.6,4.0
• Chrome 4,5,6
• Safari 3,4,5
• Opera 9,10

I use it for over 2 years now and it works really great. Probably it's the only way to run IE 6,7,8,9 on one system since installing them all in normal way in nearly impossible.