Cross-Browser Web Development

Posted by interfuse on August 13th, 2010

Web development is not what it used to be. The advent of countless new browsers and advancements in CSS coding things have gotten (to say the least) complicated. Currently we find four primary rendering engines (Gecko, WebKit, Trident, and Presto) that make up 99.99% of the browsers used to view web pages. Aside from this, Trident (Internet Explorer) makes up 80-85% of the market, followed by Fire-Fox and Safari (taking up just 2-4%).

After looking at these stats, you might come to the same conclusion I did?Ok, I?ll be writing for IE. So I have ever since, but I do on occasion double check my work in other browsers (I have about 8 of them installed) and know, something will always be off.

If you don?t want to install all of these browsers onto your computer you can stick with the top 3 (Internet Explorer, Apple Safari (or Google Chrome), and Firefox). By installing these 3 browsers you will be hitting up compatibility checks for the vast majority of all of your visitors.

If you want a more thorough check of your web site try out the utility at BrowserShots.org which will snap pictures of your website in a countless number of browsers.

For now, a partial solution to this on going problem will be to go back to basics, re-implementing tables where possible and using css style tags to adjust them accordingly. Aside from that, the freelancers over at Scriptlance have done a great job of helping with cross-browser support though; their help obviously is not free.

Like it? Share it!


interfuse

About the Author

interfuse
Joined: August 11th, 2010
Articles Posted: 18

More by this author