The Joys of Browser Testing
Monday, November 10th, 2008
I met someone the other day who had just set himself up as a marketing communications consultant, and was extolling his experience in all things advertising and marketing. He spoke of his proficiency in online and interactive marketing and asked that I visit his website so he could show me all the great things he’s worked on (I had my computer and aircard at the ready). So I proceeded to launch his site in Google Chrome, the ‘Net’s newest browser, and boy was it a mess (and he was shocked). When he saw I was using Chrome, he prompted me, after saying nobody is using it, to open the site in Explorer or Firefox. Which I did, and it looked fine (although I did notice some minor glitches in Firefox).
My point here is this: like it or not, there are multiple browsers out there, and there can be annoying differences in how each of them render code. You really need to make sure that most, if not, all visitors to your site can view and use it as you intended. It’s probably virtually impossible to get your site to look and act exactly the same on all browsers, but you need to at least spend a good amount of time (and ideally you are, or use, a good programmer that can diagnose and fix stuff).
As with just about everything, there are services out there to help. Browsershots is a free site that lets you submit a page to over 60 browser variations, and returns to you screenshots of your URL in each. It’s not instantaneous, however, taking at least a couple to complete the task. Another option is Browsercam. Browsercam is a paid service ($60-$100 per month depending on the plan you select), but it’s much more powerful than Browsershots, allowing you to check and optimizer your site on mobile devices and check javascripts, DHTML, forms and other dynamic functionality on any platform.
So that’s about it for this entry. Pretty basic stuff, but it’s an area I’m finding people are overlooking.