Setting Up a Test System
| As just mentioned, several browsers do support JavaScript. Usually, you have to support most of them. For instance, the website http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3 shows that in March 2006, Internet Explorer and Firefox together accounted for close to 95% of the browser market share, with Safari following (slightly over 3%). Netscape browsers held about 1% and Opera had about half a percent, which was about the same as all other browsers (including Konqueror) had together. So what is the best strategy to test a website on as many systems as possible, but with the least effort? It really depends on what the audience of your website is. If you have a really high portion of Mac users, you do have to do extensive testing with the Safari browser, since this browser comes by default with recent versions of Mac OS X. No matter which kind of website you are using, Internet Explorer still has a very strong market share, even on more open-sourcecentric websites. Therefore, you need Internet Explorer, and thus a Windows system is required for testing (or at least something like Virtual PC or VMware with a Windows virtual machine). All Mozilla browsers share the same codebase for rendering and also for JavaScript, and therefore it does not really matter which platform you are using (albeit there are some minimal differences). So you could, for instance, use Firefox on the same Windows machine your Internet Explorer installation resides on. Opera runs under Windows (and a couple of other systems, including Linux and Mac) as well, so the Windows partition gets one more browser. The only two major browsers now remaining are Safari and Konqueror, the latter one being the default browser when the KDE window manager is used. Luckily, they both share the same codebase, more or less: Safari uses the KHTML engine that is the heart of the Konqueror rendering. Therefore, two options come to mind:
This should at least give you a good system to start testing with. The larger the website gets, the more important it is to support as many target systems as possible; from a certain point on, you will have no other choice than to install and test on every browser you want to support. Regarding Internet Explorer, currently version 6 is the major one, whereas version 5.x is almost extinct and versions 4 and earlier are long gone. Therefore, just testing in IE 6 is acceptable in most cases. Having different versions to test is of course quite desirable, but usually requires one Windows system each, since only one IE installation per system is allowed. By accident, a solution for parallel installing several IE versions was found. You can find the original description of that on http://labs.insert-title.com/labs/Multiple-IEs-in-Windows_article795.aspx and more information at http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/multiIE.html. Finally, make sure that you test your website(s) with JavaScript both enabled and disabled in browsers. |
