Different browsers, different faces of your site

Have you ever heard about Flock, SeaMonkey, Galeon or Epiphany? I believe not. But you surely know what Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari are. Internet browsers, of course. Although most users use one of these four, there are lots of other tiny browsers out there used by a bunch of people. Thus, you might want to make sure your site is properly displayed on most if not all of them.

How can you do this? You could install all of these browsers. But, if you consider most of them have several versions, you would end up with like… 100 browsers on your system? Not really that many, ay?

Actually, i was kidding. You can’t do this, but you can use this tool/site : Browsershots It does exactly what its name says: provides shots of your site in different browsers. You have lots of options, and you can even choose to see if there are differences between the way the page is displayed on the same browsers on different operating systems: Linux (Ubuntu), Windows, Mac OS and BSD. There’s only one problem, you have to wait a little to get all the shots. A little more actually, like 1-2 hours if you select all the options. But hey, it’s free and it’s useful, so we can get over this minor disadvantage.

I found it a pretty interesting thingy that every web developer should use when coding a new layout for its blog/site. Of course, making a theme that would be properly displayed on all these browsers is a Sisif’s work. All you can do is make your code as standard compliant as possible, and hope the rendering engines used by future browsers would respect this standards (although this does not seem to be the case of the new IE8).

Tags: browser, conding, design, Firefox, Internet Explorer