How to develop a site for multiple browsers these days ?

Question

I would like to develop a site that works in all major browsers. I wonder what tools are available these days that may help me to check the functionality across browsers. I mean after I add some functionality to my site, I want to check it in all browsers. Are there any tools/software for this task ? I understand that it's impossible to check everything because it is pretty subjective if something works as expected or not, but maybe there are some tools that may found major errors (like IE is not supporting indexOf).

Answer 1

Cross-platform libraries like jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, and YUI will help you a lot with writing sites that work in all of the major browsers.

As far as testing goes, sites like BrowserShots can let you test for rendering issues across a wide variety of browsers, but for checking interactive functionality, nothing really beats just having installs of all the major browsers handy and actually working through the site's functionality on all of them.

Answer 2

Hi

in some JavaScript IDE tools (as i remember NETBEANS) , when you want to use a function ,a small pop-up windows will show you graphically that this function is supported with witch browsers(IE-Firefox-Opera-Google chrome,...).

Also you can check user's browser and use different JavaScript (like xml object in ajax)

Answer 3

I would start by developing on a more standards compliant browser such as firefox or chrome and check your progress with the versions of IE you would like to support. Check out MS Virtual PC and the hd images they give you (expiring june of this year) for both version 6 and 7 of IE. Check out this link for more info:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en