Web Development is a growing business, there are now many more ways of browsing the Internet than ever before and to enable the widest range of people to have the same experience of your site or web application you should test on multiple platforms and/or browsers. This guide explains how to set up an environment for doing just that using a variety of different tools.
No matter whether you are a web developer or a web designer, you are bound to find it easier to have a development environment rather than to experiment on your actual live site - especially as this is unprofessional to do so. Testing of this development environment should also be done using the most popular browsers at the time - namely Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2, Safari, and Opera. The ideal scenario is to be able to test in as many browsers as you can. If you have a Duo Core (or Duo2 Core) based Apple Mac then your options are opened up slightly as you can make use of virtualisation to test in Windows / Linux browsers, and can use any Mac based browser you want to as well.
Creating your ideal development environment is going to depend largely on the platform you develop on, the technologies you use, and what your requirements are. In this guide I'm going to cover a number of different ways of setting up browser testing environments, but by no means are these all of them; and will also be taking a brief look at installing and configuring AMP based servers.
In a Microsoft Windows environment you will already have at least one browser installed by default - and depending on the age of your system and/or how often you update your Windows install, you are likely to have either Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7. At present the number of users that browse sites using IE 5.5 or below is so low that you shouldn't need to cater for them unless your target audience is known to largely use 5.5 or at least a percentage of over 5-10% of users - this can be found using some simple market research using analytics programs such as Google Analytics, or manually browsing your Apache log files (assuming you are using Apache).
Internet Explorer is not an easy browser to have multiple versions of, and to do so you can try 1 of about 3 methods (there are more I'm not going to cover).
- If you need access to IE6 or IE7 from a Windows PC where the other browser is currently installed you can use the Virtual PC image that is available from Microsoft. I've not tried it, but I imagine both the images they provide would also work with Virtual PC for the Mac.
- Install one or more virtual machines using VMWare Server that contains a different version of Internet Explorer - this option will also work on Linux distributions and on Mac OS X using tools such as VMWare Fusion.
- On a Windows based PC you can also use standalone executables from the evolt Browser Archive
