Thursday, July 10, 2008

Browser testing Article

Browser Tests, Services and Compatibility Test Suites

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/10/02/browser-tests-services-and-compatibility-test-suites/

Lists various resources for browser testing, such as iecapture, multipleie, browser statistics, multi-safari, linux stuff, all the 'browser cam' services, acid test, cool png test images for testing what png types are supported,

A good reminder on whats really necessary when testing:
There really isn’t a reason to test multiple versions of browsers like Safari, Firefox, or Opera. I say this for two reasons; first, there isn’t the marketshare to do extensive testing for browsers that are in the vast minority; and second, IE6 is effectively the lowest common denominator as far as features and creative CSS/HTML rendering. Generally, when you bend over backwards to support IE6, you’re stripping out a lot of the things that even the good browsers would get tripped up on.

An unintentional third reason is that users of nonstandard browsers tend to be more tech-savvy and tend to upgrade reasonably quickly when prompted to do so.

SOME STAT EXAMPLES:

Netherlands:
IE 6.0 – 47.6%
IE 7.0 – 41.1%
Firefox 2 – 6.1%
Safari 2 – 1.6%
Opera 9.2 – 0.7%
Firefox 1.5 – 0.4%
IE 5.0 – 0.4%
Mozilla 1.8 - 0.3%
Opera 9.0 – 0.2%
Others – 1.3%

From a site that gets 80,000 visits monthly, mostly U.S. but worldwide too. We see that Netscape is even lower than Opera. Netscape not worth worrying about??

1. Internet Explorer 76.96%
2. Firefox 19.80%
3. Safari 1.94%
4. Opera 0.74%
5. Mozilla 0.30%
6. Netscape 0.14%
7. Camino 0.05%
8. Konqueror 0.02%

IE Breakdown
1. 6.0 75.07%
2. 7.0 24.54%

Firefox Breakdown
1. 2.0.0.6 53.57%
2. 2.0.0.7 32.57%

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