by Kyle Weems 9.May 2008 08:10
Variety in donuts is cheap. Part of the appeal to working at Mindfly is the close proximity to Rocket Donuts. Although this hasn't done my waistband any favors, it does make it altogether too easy to buy a baker's dozen of donuts for under $12.
In the browser world, variety gets expensive after a point. Like any developer studio, Mindfly has several browsers on hand to see how our websites are rendering. Granted, we're very web standards oriented (I feel like I should capitalize that for emphasis). Although this means in theory a website should look mostly the same in every browser, in practice we all know this doesn't work out so well (as I've ranted frequently about in the past). In particular, IE6 and IE7 (which sadly have the largest share of the Internet Pie... which is something I now want to bake) are renowned for sort of taking standards like guidlines that can be conveniently ignored.
Mindfly is a Windows-based shop (I'm sure plenty of you designers don't believe that's possible, but it is!) so it's free/easy for us to test our sites on IE7, IE6 (via the virtual pc), Firefox, Opera, and Safari/Win. However, our token Apple's operating system isn't up to date, so we don't have the newer version of Safari/Mac to test. Furthermore, although it's a small piece of the pie, we don't have any Linux boxes to test the million different browsers supported by the various Linux flavors.
What do we do? Ignore the problem and tell Apple to shove it? Spends lots of money on tons of computers?
No.
First, designing with standards fixes the vast majority of potential problems before they happen.
Secondly, if you need to confirm any visual glitches on a website in a browser you don't have, you can check out Browsershots.
I've had it pointed out to me just recently, but it's a neat little site that you can give any url to check out, and after some processing time it shows you how that url renders on a cornucopia of browsers (quite a few more than a baker's dozen, I might add). I'm not sure that I need to know how a site renders with Kazehakase 0.5.4 on PLD Titanium. But if a client is complaining of an issue in Safari/Mac, I can give it a quick look.
There's severe limitations, of course. It's just doing a screenshot of the page, so there's no interaction. And it's not practical to do edits, take a snapshot, do edits, take a snapshot, etc. But used appropriately, I can see Browsershots being the sort of tool that helps spot glaring issues before a client does.