Hot answers tagged browsers
51
Common reasons people avoid browser upgrades:
They can't, either because doing so requires admin access (e.g. university networks), or because their hardware and operating system prevents it (or both).
They don't know how. Firefox is famous for prompting people to upgrade. Chrome does it in the background. Safari does it through system updates. But earlier ...
37
I agree that your decision obviously should reflect the business realities and audience of your particular website.
That said, large companies officially dropping support for IE6 is still significant. It raises the general perception that it is finally OK to leave a 10 year old browser behind. It also adds ammunition to any case you wish to make to the ...
34
Make your site play well with IE8. Really.
IE8 isn't all that outdated. Unless your site is made solely to cater to them, in which case it should have been made to work with what they have in the first place.
You don't have control over what they run...they don't have control over what they run...but you do have control over what you serve. So the answer ...
32
BrowsersShots and BrowserLabs are what I can think of off the top of my head. I think there is also something else I've used but I can't recall the name right now.
32
http://browsershots.org/ (online service).
http://www.browsera.com/ (online service, not free).
http://crossbrowsertesting.com/ (on-line service, not free).
http://www.multibrowserviewer.com/ (virtualized web browsers, not free).
http://www.browserseal.com/ (virtualized web browsers, not free).
Multi Browser vmWare Appliance: ...
22
There are actually a number of reasons. Most of them are related to corporations and I think looking at the difference in visitor browsers for corp websites vs personal sites (e.g. amazon.com, zappos.com, etc)
Large and Medium size Corporations use software that requires a specific browser, usually IE6. Because of this, they create a software constraint ...
15
There is a round-up of them on Mashable (second section).
iBBDemo2 — This Adobe Air app will let you see content as it would appear on the iPad and on the iPhone. Support for Android is reportedly coming soon. The app is a bit slow but it does a good job showing accurate results for iOS devices. Just point the app towards your test mobile site.
...
14
Here's the excellent Browser Size tool from Google showing how many percent of users will see the different areas of your website. This really helps to check webpages and ensure that people on 'shallow' screens (most laptops have very wide but very shallow/not deep screens) can see your important content and calls to action.
Update: Google has now added ...
13
Yes, all mainstream browsers "append a slash" to the HTTP request when requesting a bare domain URL (ie. the homepage). This is actually necessary in order to make the HTTP request valid, which for http://example.com/ is:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Note the / (slash) in the first line - this is the URL being requested. It is not valid to have ...
12
IE6-8, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. I also test with JavaScript disabled. In the future and as resources allow, I'd consider the iPhone, iPad, Android for mobile platforms and text-only browser like Lynx for accessibility purposes. Beyond that, for me at least, the percentages get so low that there are diminishing returns for each additional browser.
...
11
Very poor implementation on Apple's part (I hear this also happens on the iPad, where it makes no sense whatsoever), but there is a fix:
<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />
Source:
http://www.darowski.com/tracesofinspiration/2009/03/31/stop-iphone-from-incorrectly-auto-linking-phone-numbers/
One of the comments on that page ...
11
For non-personal sites this should only be done if (for some reason) the site will not perform well in the out-of-date browser. Non-personal sites (be they business, governmental etc.) are not typically there to serve an agenda, so if the site works (mostly) in IE 6 (or any outdated) browser, let it be. Your users aren't there to be lectured on their choice ...
11
Yes, most browsers from the last 5-10 years will try the other A records if one fails to respond. This is sometimes called "browser retry" or "client retry" apparently. You'll pretty much only find stuff about it in the context of the various browser exploits which this feature enables against sites not using it (see DNS rebinding and DNS pinning, anti-dns ...
10
LitmusApp is a new player in the field. Their current major value-add is e-mail client testing (33 clients, including mobile), but they also do "in the cloud" browser testing of up to 24 browsers. In fact, browser testing was their first product, and it's still available independently through the Alkaline tool.
I use Alkaline routinely. It's quite nice.
...
10
A browser recommendation is usually a Do Not Enter sign. Unless you have an extremely popular service with unique features, it is extremely unlikely that people will change browsers for you. Therefore they are highly likely to simply leave.
This does not mean you have to write code that works perfectly for every browser. In a support page somewhere you can ...
10
Auto-discovery still works for most feed-readers, for instance with Google Reader I just tested out this page and plugged the exact URL in the subscribe text input. It then automatically subscribed to the comments for this question.
So no, providing an image with a link is just a visual way of letting users know that there's an RSS feed available if they're ...
9
There is actually a FireBug plugin called FireDiff that lets you export style and DOM changes.
Alternatively, you could use the Web Developer add-on to save the CSS.
Lastly, FireBug can be linked to Eclipse using Fireclipse, and from there save the CSS.
See this StackOverflow question for more solutions.
7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
This page list the best and most reliable source of information on the market share of browser. Pretty much everything that people will answer is listed there.
Here's the list :
W3Counter : http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Net Applications : ...
7
I currently testing my websites in this browsers. I have this browsers installed through virtual machines.
Internet Explorer 6 on XP
Internet Explorer 7 on XP
Internet Explorer 8 on Window 7
Firefox 1.5 on XP
Firefox 2 on XP
Firefox 3 on Windows 7
Safari 3
Safari 4
Safari 5
Chrome 5
Opera 9
Opera 10
...
7
Google Browser Size
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
This is a super tool which should fill all your needs, allowing you to even load in a URL and see what it looks like in different resolutions.
7
I am a product manager about to spend 40 MD supporting IE6 for a single customer. We sell software into call centers, an unfortunately IE6 is the default platform for many big organizations.
My point is it depends, if I was building consumer web software I would have been off IE6 a long time ago, but as long as we have clients using IE6 we have to support ...
7
Wikipedia provides an updated browser statistics summary that includes the top sources and median of these sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table
For most uses, the wikipedia median is probably your best estimate for accurate browser statistics.
Each of the main browser stats providers are not 100% reliable ...
7
This is a product and policy question, not a technical question. However, I deal with a similar situation - we host a website that is based on a vendor's product, and it has a compatibility list. That list is given to our customers as part of their statement of work. If they can't run the browser(s) that we say our site works with, they don't get support for ...
6
For a long time, I only tested on Chrome/Firefox/Safari/IE/Opera on Windows, but about 2 years ago, I ran into a problem where the client was complaining about a screwed up layout on their Mac. I looked at the site in Adobe Browser Lab using OS X Safari and indeed it was rendering improperly compared to Safari for Windows.
Ever since then, I've stopped ...
6
Chrome and Safari send an X-Purpose: preview HTTP header when pre-fetching/rendering web content. [Source]
Firefox sends a similar header called X-moz: prefetch. [Source]
To block pre-fetching, you could return a 404 response when such headers are detected, as suggested by Peter Freitag in this blog post. He recommends adding these lines to .htaccess to ...
5
A lot of great resources listed in the answers so far, great question.
To me, the only reliable source of data you should look at for browser usage, and thus, what you need make sure you're supporting well, is your own site. Keep an eye on those breakdowns and you'll have a sense of your actual audience. If you get spikes in traffic because of news or ...
5
MS also have (as part of the Expression toolkit) a product called SuperPreview, which allows you to work either side-by-side or overlaid with an interactive version of your site in all versions of IE and the latest version of Firefox.
It also includes access to a web service that show you what your site looks like in Safari on a Mac - this will generate an ...
5
To indirectly reach the Console in Opera (checked on v9.6) the shortcut is CTRL + SHIFT + I while on Safari 5 (on Windows) it is CTRL + ALT + I
I wish all the browser makers could get together to standardize the keyboard shortcuts.
Update: It appears that the REPL tab under the Scripts tab in Opera Dragonfly in Opera 11 is similar to the Console option ...
5
It's a good idea to wrap phone numbers in tel URIs because:
Mobile browsers often parse numbers incorrectly, especially with unusual formats. All they're doing is attempting to wrap phone numbers in anchor links and tel URIs; doing it for them reduces the chance of error.
It's a vendor-neutral, official proposed standard that desktop VOIP phone clients ...
5
What happens when multiple sites refer a css/js having same name.
If they are served from different URLs then the browser will consider them to be different resources and fetch both.
What happens when sub-domains refer a same css/js
If they are served from different URLs then the browser will consider them to be different resources and fetch ...
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