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Browser Check!

By Robert Campbell on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 Print This Post
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I’m assuming most web designers do, but some may not. In either case, here is a reminder or suggestion to check your sites on more than just one browser.

screen shot of site using FF3

Here is a car insurance site, fancyaCar, that was designed by someone that I can only guess, uses Internet Explorer as their main browser. Using IE is not a problem, most people do. The problem is that they forgot to check what the site looked like using an alternate browser, like the latest version of Firefox.

Looking at the screen shot I took using FF you can see the text over lapping another column. It’s an easy fix, but it’s also an easy miss, and many webmasters make this mistake. Looking at the site using IE, the error is not evident in version 6 or 7.

So how do you check your site on all those different browsers? It’s not like I have twenty different browsers, and all of their different versions running on my pc. Since I primarily use Firefox, the first test I like to do is to see how it looks in IE. I do this by going to the site, IE NetRender. It quickly produces screen shots of your site in the version of IE you request. You can even do overlapping comparisions. The second place I go is Browsershots. Using their service, you can get a screen shot for just about every browser, and every version there is. The only problem with Browsershots, is that you must wait a few minutes to get the results.

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2 Comments on “Browser Check!”

  1. Thanks for the tip about NetRender. I usually use Browsershots but have found their IE renders aren’t great – for example it might say Flash 9 installed and not be able to render any Flash at all. To save waiting time I also choose only a handful of the most popular browsers IE 6, 7, 8 FF 2, 3 and maybe one or two others. I design on Mac and have a good range of relevant Mac browsers installed so I really only focus on PC browsers.

  2. Thanks for the comment. NetRender is quick, and that is what I like about it. Designing for the majority, PC Browsers, smart way to go.

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