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Different browsers :

Check your own pages or a website of your choice in a variety of browsers, old and new. Each browser has its own quirks when it comes to interpreting instructions and displaying pages. Even if a browser is not capable of displaying a page as the designer intended it, the content should still be accessible and make sense.

Here are some of the things that should be considered for each browser:

Internet Explorer

...is momentarily the most used browser, but other browsers such as Netscape, Opera, and text-only browsers such as Lynx are also in widespread use. It would be foolish to exclude users of less popular browsers, just like it is foolish and unethical to exclude users of assistive technologies.

In October 2001 the MSN (Microsoft Network) website became unavailable to non-Microsoft browsers, which caused a great uproar among web communities, especially Opera users, who constitute a rapidly growing percentage of web surfers.

Internet Explorer users tend to upgrade quickly to newer versions, but older versions, such as IE 3, are still used on older machines.

Opera

...has a well-earned reputation as a standard-compliant and very accessible browser. It offers great control over presentation and layout and numerous keyboard shortcuts for mouseless access. Graphics can be turned off with one click and it is easy to apply your preferred styles, colours and fonts.

Learn more: Evolt.org article that describes Opera 7's standard and accessibility features.

Netscape 4

...is still widely used, especially in educational institutions. Netcape 4 now belongs to the group of legacy browsers. Web designers would like to see it disappear as quickly as possible because of its lack of support for standards. Netscape 4 has its origins in a period where browsers were using non-standard tags that didn't work in other browsers. It has problems with the some of the latest specifications and standards, especially support for style sheets. This is probably the single most important browser to keep checking your pages in.

Netscape 7

...is currently the most up-to-date version of the Netscape browser. Netscape 6 and 7 are much improved standard-compliant browsers based on Mozilla.

Mozilla

...is an excellent open-source browser. Version 1.0 was released after years of development in June 2002. It has been hailed as standard-compliant and is popular with previous Netscape users and the Linux community.

Lynx

...is a popular text-only browser, which displays no images, but does display the alternative description (the content of the ALT attribute), if one has been included. It is often used in conjunction with screen readers, because a text-only display is easier to handle.

WebTV

It is also a good idea to test if a site works on WebTV. Many people access the Internet through their TV, which has some serious limitations compared to the computer screen, such as restricted colour range and screen size and limited support for style sheets and scripting techniques.

Resources

The resource section contains links where you can download different browsers, including a WebTV viewer.

Evaluation

[ Introduction ]
[ First impressions ]
[ Keyboard access ]
[ Different browsers ]
[ User control over presentation ]
[ Validation of code ]
[ Case studies ]

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