Cross Platform Validation
One great thing about web development over the past couple of years, is that we’ve finally seen a breakdown of the IE hegemony! IE is still over 60%, but at least most folks are running version 8. (Really? Why are you still using IE?) But its made testing and developing web sites a bit more of a chore. Add in the recent explosion of varying mobile devices, and suddenly you’ve got a couple dozen viable operating systems and browsers to support. (Or, at least to think about supporting.)
As a professor at a small college, its become beyond my abilities to support and maintain multiple testing kits - even with dual or tri-booting machines, it’s too time consuming. So, I’ve decided to outsource. There are two compelling services that I know of off the top of my head: Litmus and CrossBrowserTesting. I decided to test both, and both are quality services. I think that if you were running email marketing campaigns, Litmus might have an edge for you. For general web development, I found both services adequate. In the end, I decided to go with CrossBrowserTesting, primarily because: 1) it was cheaper, 2) did everything I needed, and 3) had a more robust free trial period which made for a better evaluation.
Best of all - this is going to speed up certain elements of my grading in my web development courses…
Other Notes: Most everything works on the Mac OS with each browser. Linux/Unix boxes running Firefox are all good; some of the ancillary browsers are problematic, but do a good enough job of rendering most valid CSS and constitute such a small market percentage it’s not worth addressing. Windows machines are much more problematic; but if you are running a recent version life is better. IE versions before 8 remain the biggest problem. The question now is: do I add browser detection and route folks to a different style sheet, or just forget about it? IE 6 & 7 make up about 24% of the general web viewing population, and about 8% of the folks that access my content.
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Comments:
You’re trying to earn bonus points aren’t you?
I’m still struggling with this issue as I need to backdate my web site for IE6 or at least do something about it. It just seems hard to spend time on that with so many other things to do. Especially when only 11% of the web viewing public use that version (the one that breaks on my stuff)...
always 
most people would say that those 11% dont matter, its nice of you to take everyone into consideration.
IE people matter! When I was reading your blog on my work computer I was still using IE (I know, I know, I know haha) BUT I like to think I matter since I’m a faithful reader despite my t-shirt that still claims otherwise. However, I think I’m finally done when I get my computer back (it crashed) because despite some compatibly errors for Chrome on certain sites that matter (like AES) I love Chrome and it seems less susceptible to viruses and errors . And if my stubborn ways are I’m coming around, I’m sure most people will be too. I mean I do proudly still use a portable cd player and buy new cds….
So funny you should mention IE. Over the holidays I took a season sales representative job with Xbox during their launch of the Kinect. During the job we had to fill run sheets out online saying we where there, what we sold, what was in stock out of stock those sorts of things. Well like I normal college student I went to do it all through Firefox and couldnt get into the website. So after many calls to my supervisor and his many calls to the main people in Texas we were informed that we needed to be on a PC and using IE to complete these tasks! I found this outrageous that a COMPANY was still dependent on making their employees use IE.
See you monday