Testing New Websites Using Different Browsers Did you wish you had an older browser?

I was testing a website setup that was working perfect in one browser, when the new version (browser) was installed the site looked like 'trash'.

The second issue is when I get an email complainig that your website don't work in such and such a browser and you wish you had that version to test with.

Here is a link that I found to a repository of old and new browsers. This site include some of the more obscure browsers out there.

So if you ever wish you had a browser to test your site, here is a link: http://browsers.evolt.org/

Nils

Hi,Thanks buddy i will visit the site,Thanks

Thanks for the site on browsers. It is good to test your site in several browsers. The link will come in handy.

Wow, there's a lot of browsers there! But I believe only a few browsers dominate the market. People mostly surf on browsers like IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and so on. The other obscure ones probably only take up some 1% of the market. So no point testing your sites in the other less-known browsers, just test with the more popular ones.

Correct, I think IE, Opera, Mozilla and Firefox take up around 90% of users. With some browsers taking up 2-3% each and then all those obscure brosers take up only 1% on their own. Its hard to tackle as there is so many of them. I guess we may just have to ask other people we know to test out our sites on these browsers and not just ourselves.

I am all about accessibility so I make my sites as accessible as possible using css. I try to make the site look identical on the major browsers (where css and css-hacks will allow) beyond that, I think any site visitor who wants to enjoy the benefits of eye-pleasing layouts should download a new and standards compliant browser (like Firefox).Pampering users of obscure (and more importantly, non-standards-compliant browsers) causes the vendors of those obscure and non-standards-compliant browsers to keep pushing mediocre merchandise .thanks for the link nonetheless

I agree, I think most websites should be built to standards, the link was for those who wish they could test with a different browser (including myself).

Stat tidbits:

It's interesting to see how many different browsers are in the log file and how they are identified. In the short time that I have played with website building tracking I'm amased at the inconsistensies.

I looked at one set of statistics from 5 different sources. They all have IE6 in the 60 to 70% range of all browsers. One, an IPP miscounts Opera and Gecko based browsers as "Unknown", the second site (counter) miscounted KHTML- and Gecko-based browsers, USCG (US coast guard) have a large percentage of unknown i.e. not counting Opera and KHTM based browsers correctly. The last site is a narrow target audience and the stats source isn't fully reporting less-common browsers again.

On the other hand you can go to http://www.mywebsite.force9.co.uk/ to see a snapshot of 3 different counters and some stats for 2 days after the counters was reset in November.

Opera seem to identify itself as MSIE, I'm not sure if that is a 'spoofing trick" since I don't use Opera.

Here are some pie charts, Mozilla rules: http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/inquisitor/browsers.html

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please: facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable" â Mark Twain

Lynx is an old text based browser. It is very useful to be compatible with this browser if you plan for your site to be accesed by the visualy impaired. Most of the equipment for reading text on the web out loud is done through the Lynx browser. Another of the lesser known but still fairly comon browser's is the Off-by-One browser. It is an ultra light weight and extreemly fast web browser. It is very usefull if you are on a slow dial up conection.

that was a huge browser list. never heard some of those before. lol.. nice link by the way!

Great information, just what we need to test our website projects on quite a lot of browsers.

 

Thank you very much NilsC.

 

Interesting statistic at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp

 

Browser Statistics Month by Month

2005 IE 6 IE 5 O 7/8 Ffox Moz NN 4 NN 7

April 62.3% 3.4% 1.9% 23.9% 3.5% 0.2% 0.9%

March 63.8% 3.9% 1.8% 21.8% 3.7% 0.2% 1.0%

Feb 64.8% 4.2% 1.9% 20.4% 3.9% 0.2% 1.1%

Jan 65.3% 4.4% 2.1% 19.3% 4.0% 0.3% 1.1%

 

Look the growth of Ffox that just begun this year and got close to 24% in April

Another point to note is that it's not just about coding for standards, the whole point is that CSS, even standard CSS, tends to screw up with different browsers. Especially if you're using CSS to do the layout of your page. I just spent an hour last night reading through three articles on the pros and cons of using CSS to do your layout versus using tables, and they all say that CSS screws up more often than tables in terms of consistent design over different browsers, especially older ones...

The link is great! Not trying to be picky or anything, but Mozilla and Firefox are the same thing, just thought I'd tell those who posted Mozilla and Firefox being different browsers. Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox. Have a nice day!

I'm don't know much about html (it's been two years since I had to learn it at school), but there is a standard form of html that works on all browsers, right? As in basic tags and tables kind of things?or am I completely wrong with this? It doesn't seem to smart to have a couple hundred different browsers that all read html in different ways, there has to some form of standardization, otherwise the internet would become impossible to use.

It doesn't seem to smart to have a couple hundred different browsers that all read html in different ways, there has to some form of standardization, otherwise the internet would become impossible to use.

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Somehow it's the same thing with any spoken language. There is only one ENGLISH, but it sounds different in ireland than it does in Canada. But it's still english. Even if it's difficult sometimes, all english native speakers will understand each other. And I guess EVERY browser will speak HTML ....

... hopefully

Yeah, Firefox is becoming really popular for people who don't like Internet Explorer. And NilsC thanks for that site, it is really useful.