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Always Test Your Site with Internet Explorer AND Firefox/Mozilla

August 10, 2007

A while back, I made a mistake with some of the JavaScript dealing with the signup form on this site. I fixed it, so if anyone is still having a problem signing up, just post a comment to this post letting me know. But... the problem would NOT happen for me... I could signup and it would work. What does this mean? This means I should have tested the page in more than one browser! And if fact, I did... but sometime later, I made a slight tweak that broke it under some conditions... and after making the slight tweak to the code, I only tested with Internet Explorer. I know, I know... if you've read some of my other posts here on debugging JavaScript or HTML/CSS, you know that I recommend to test and view your pages in several browsers. But sometimes we don't follow our own advice and we look foolish!

So I wondered how many different browsers people were using to view this blog. Here are some stats from the last few months. This shows that Microsoft is loosing ground with Internet Explorer: if you have a blog or web site you should test your pages with Internet Explorer and something like Firefox that uses the mozilla engine.

June 2007

1 = Mozilla 1.0/Netscape 6.x
2 = Internet Explorer 7.0
3 = Internet Explorer 6.0
4 = Safari

July 2007

1 = Internet Explorer 7.0
2 = Mozilla 1.0/Netscape 6.x
3 = Internet Explorer 6.0
4 = Netscape 4.0

August 2007 (8/1 to 8/10)

1 = Mozilla 1.0/Netscape 6.x
2 = Internet Explorer 7.0
3 = Internet Explorer 6.0
4 = Safari

Test, Test, TEST!

Until next time,
Fred

About the Author

Fred Black is an experienced programmer, web site developer, online business operator, systems integrator, father, husband, musician, and songwriter. Visit his Internet Business Blog at: http://www.pqInternet.com.

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Posted by Fred on August 10, 2007 | Printer-Friendly

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From: Writer

I've had an email that said my site ( http://christiandivorce.1hwy.com/index.html ) does not show up correctly in foxfire and mozilla...

I don't know why this is but I can't find a way (so far) to test it without downloading the foxfire and mozilla browsers (I have an earlier computer and am uncomfortable downloading these)

Is there a way a test can be run by me to see it for myself without getting these browsers?

Thanks
Posted by Writer on October 9, 2007 6:38 PM
From Fred...

Hi "Writer";
You do have some alignment issues towards the bottom of the page, where the copyright info starts. In Firefox the content is not centered. A set of tags would probably fix it.

I would not worry about installing Firefox. On a PC with limited resources it will probably run better than Internet Explorer and you'll probably end up using it more than IE. You should always test in both.

There are some sites on the Internet that will test your web page in several browsers and show you a screen shot of how it looked. While this may be useful, it's much easier to just install Firefox and test in IE and Firefox.

I hope this helps. For more information, see my two courses, Web Site Creation and Web Site Scripting in the top right column of this blog.

Fred
Posted by Fred Black on October 9, 2007 8:37 PM