How do you handle cross-browser compatibility testing?

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ameoba

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Working for a small web design/development firm, we're sometimes tasked, by clients, who are unwilling to budge on their browser compatability list. Any given project could need to be tested against some combination of IE 6, 7 & 8, Firefox 2 & 3, Opera, Safari & Chrome running on OS X, Windows XP, Vista or Linux.

Since the bulk of development can (and should) be done in a modern, standards compliant browser, I had considered a headless Mac Mini running OS X and a few VMs that would take remote connections. Unfortunately, the Mini maxes out at 2GB which limits the number of simultaneous VMs. The iMac, with it's 20" screen seems overkill for a machine that'll spend much of its time idling in the corner. Having a single Macbook is

Having every developer multi-boot or load their machine down with VMs and then deal with hacks to run multiple versions of the same browser just becomes a hassle to keep running, so having a central system seems like it'd be good way to have everything set up & known to be working.

How has everyone else dealt with this in the past? Since there's plenty of Macs around the building, having the box only handle the Windows & Linux browsers is an option - even if it wouldn't be near as cool.
 
At the studio I work in we use BrowserShots to take a quick peaks at how it looks or renders in a browser and we have a single machine that runs various VM's for the popular browsers / operating systems. We didn't want the machine to be wasted, so we turned it into a file server for all our documents as well.
 
my work machine runs IE6 (work standard), FF3, Opera and Safari. I also have 2 VM's running Vista with IE7 and IE8 respectively. We also have an ancient G3 Mac with Camino and FF, so that pretty much covers everything.

My normal work process is to first develop with FF (and web developer extension). 99% of the time all the other browsers except IE6 fall in line with FF so I really don't spend a lot of time with the other browsers and VM's, just long enough to confirm the layout works.. Opera sometimes will bitch slap me if I try to be too lazy with the CSS.

Then begins the long, laborious process of getting it to render properly in IE6.. we all know how that story goes... :mad:

Last year I made the decision to abandon IE5 completely (or web logs showed <1% of visitors were still using it), which reduced my aggregation level somewhat. I can't wait for IE6 to finally be a distant bad memory as well.
 
ameoba said:
Working for a small web design/development firm, we're sometimes tasked, by clients, who are unwilling to budge on their browser compatability list. Any given project could need to be tested against some combination of IE 6, 7 & 8, Firefox 2 & 3, Opera, Safari & Chrome running on OS X, Windows XP, Vista or Linux.
Click to expand...

I find it surprising that you dont ensure that every site you create is compatibility tested on everything you listed. Anything less is poor design in my opinion. I am just one person doing web development and I test every site I do on XP, Vista, and OS X with IE6, 7, 8, FF 2,3 Opera, Safari, and Chrome. Even on small sites with less than 10 visitors per day I see traffic with all of these browers. I think anything less is not delivering a good quality.

I use a virtual machine server with 8gb of memory running virtual machines of XP, Vista, and Ubuntu. This is really not a very expensive setup to have and you can run 4-6 virtual machines at any given time.

I have found that working with Firefox and checking once in awhile with IE7 and IE6 I can get a design that will work across all browsers fairly easily and then I just have to run a quick check with the other browsers.
 
Icemastr said:
I find it surprising that you dont ensure that every site you create is compatibility tested on everything you listed. Anything less is poor design in my opinion. I am just one person doing web development and I test every site I do on XP, Vista, and OS X with IE6, 7, 8, FF 2,3 Opera, Safari, and Chrome.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, as a business, rather than the Make the Web Beautiful for Users of Obscure, Unreleased and Outdated Browsers Foundation, unless a client is willing to commit to paying for the extra time, some browsers won't get any attention (not to mention that our design stuff is opposed, on principal, to continued support of IE6). On a static site with a simple design, the overhead isn't too bad but once you get to a complex, interactive site with a bunch of different things to display and JS interaction, you could easily spend a whole day going through the site with all those browsers, before you even start modifying things (which would necessitate retesting the site with other browsers to check for regressions).
 
ameoba said:
Unfortunately, as a business, rather than the Make the Web Beautiful for Users of Obscure, Unreleased and Outdated Browsers Foundation, unless a client is willing to commit to paying for the extra time, some browsers won't get any attention (not to mention that our design stuff is opposed, on principal, to continued support of IE6). On a static site with a simple design, the overhead isn't too bad but once you get to a complex, interactive site with a bunch of different things to display and JS interaction, you could easily spend a whole day going through the site with all those browsers, before you even start modifying things (which would necessitate retesting the site with other browsers to check for regressions).
Click to expand...
+1

I suggest focusing on FF, IE, and possibly the latest Safari. That will cover the 95-98% of all browsers commonly used by the world. If your dev machine is running Windows (potentially with Boot Camp after re-evaluating the first post), then you can cover FF, Safari, and several versions of Internet Explorer on the same box. VMware Fusion would allow you to add Windows to your local dev testing if your dev box is a Mac, while removing downtime from rebooting between Mac/Windows installations. As previously mentioned, you can use BrowserShots.org if you want to see some other less common combinations being used.


Off-topic:
I laughed after reading the "Make the Web Beautiful for Users of Obscure, Unreleased and Outdated Browsers Foundation" comment. That's just priceless :D
 
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