If my app has been tested in Firefox 3, Safari 3 & IE 7 will it need additional testing for Chrome?
If there are areas that'll need further testing -- then are there any online guides I could share with my designers & developers?
At what point will Chrome be considered to have sufficient market share to be treated as a mainstream browser?
Chrome already got a small percentage of the community. However as far as I know, Chrome follows the standards from W3C and all websites that work in IE6, IE7 and FF2 / 3 has worked perfectly for me.
So by that said, i think you should already be testing your applications in chrome as well.
Always test in these browsers nowdays:
If it's working fine on Safari, it will probably work on Chrome as well. The only difference is the JavaScript engine, but I've yet to see a real world example of some legitim JavaScript code not working on Chrome.
Personally I test my stuff with Chrome because I use Chrome intensively for development. It is good practice to test your pages with at least one WebKit (or KHTML) based browser though.
Theoretically, because Google Chrome uses the same engine as Safari (WebKit), you've already tested. But Google has made several changes to the engine, including rewriting the JavaScript interpreter completely. Additional testing never hurts and it wouldn't take long to confirm that everything works as expected.
Now that GMail suggests people switch from IE to Firefox and Chrome, I'm guessing we'll see IE lose more and more market share to those browsers. Chrome doesn't have much of a user-base now, but I can imagine that will change.
Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is also used in Safari and some other small browsers. Overall with both Chrome and Safari gaining in market share it is definately a browser to test (you only really need to test one). It's very standards compliant and is constantly having updates to keep up with new CSS drafts.
Webkits main Site - http://webkit.org/
Browser Market Share http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers are good places to look for market share of browsers although they show very different responses on Chrome.
According to Wikipedia roughly 7.96% of poeple are using WebKit based browsers however W3C shows that in November only 5.8% did.
Better test on it. I've already run across sites that work in Safari but don't in Chrome. I have IE8b2, FF3, Safari, and Chrome all installed on my machine. Not for testing reasons, but because of the websites that I visit. Takes all 4 of those to get all the websites to show right...
Chrome uses the WebKit engine, which as I recall is the same engine used by Safari. So in theory, if your site works for Safari it should work for Chrome, as well.
Refer to this Google's Chrome page for details.
if you don't have PNG24 with opacity changed from CSS, all things should be fine.
However, i always try in all modern browsers (ie6/7, ff2/3, opera 9.x, safari and chrome).
According to Wikipedia, Chrome has a 0.78% usage rate right now. Depending on your audience the actual number of users might be low, and not really require testing.