Cross-Browser Madness
Dealing with cross-browser issues can really be frustrating. Just today, we spent more than five hours fixing this type of problem. For every project (or queued task), we are spending 40% of development time just to test the result in different web browsers. And that's only system test. For unit testing, we allot another 50% of development time. So all in all, for a given task, the total hours spent is almost tripled than the original estimate. This process is an overkill for me but according to my boss, this one of the most effective way to ensure quality. I can't really blame them for trying. As a web development company, they have wrestled with this kind of stuff for so long. And with the ever-changing landscape in IT, this one is really here to stay. Ugh. Right now, we have four major browsers, they are:
- Internet Explorer 7
- Internet Explorer 6 (this one is a toughie)
- Mozilla Firefox
- Opera
Tools. You gotta have tools for this. For Internet Explorer 7 I only have one, the Developer Toolbar. Its extremely useful for digging into details. The View DOM feature is good for scripts that traverse through page. For Firefox, Firebug is really handy for inspecting your page' elements. Also the "refreshable" source view is the most underrated feature of FF for developers. Try it. View your page via FF, then change its code. But instead of going to the browser to refresh and view the source code again, just press F5 on the source' code window. Neat, huh? The LinkChecker plugin is also indespensable. Surprisingly, We don't encounter much trouble in Opera (I'm using v9.2) . Whenever a page is fine with IE7, it also looks good in Opera.
I have also installed MultipleIEs, a program that bundles the several versions of IE (3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0). You can have this versions run side-by-side with IE 7! A really cool pieace of software. Firefox is the second most troublesome browser (Next to IE 6). So we test everything first to FF then IE7 and last is Opera.