[Pro] Best ways to reliably test your sites

Freeway
1

I spent the whole of yesterday working on a new site I’m building and it was all looking good on my Mac browsers but when I had a look on Internet Explorer 9 via Parallels the title was cropped and there was a strange glitch at the bottom of the screen where a grey bar from the background had appeared on the main section, which caused a predictable degree of affectionate profanity aimed at Microsoft.

A friend who is a designer suggested I check it using the Internet Explorer developer tools, which I did and suddenly it looked fine, except that it wasn’t showing the Open Sans font, which is placed in the CSS by a link to Google.

This was perplexing so I visited the Adobe browser labs at https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html and discovered that IE 7,8 and 9 were all pretty good. FireFox 11 on the Mac looked great but on Windows it looked like somebody had slipped it some hallucinogenic drugs which produced a strange rainbow coloured text. In Windows Chrome the text rendered horribly but here on my computer it looks fine.

The point of my long preamble here is how on earth are we supposed to reliably test our sites when faced with such widely differing results depending on where they are viewed? Does anybody have any better ways of analysing these things?

Thanks

Ashley
PS The site validates perfectly as Xhtml 1.0 strict.

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2

Just as a follow up to my last message it sure would be good if Softpress could find a way to reliably show us how the site would look in different browsers from within Freeway.

Ashley

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it sure would be good if Softpress could find a way to reliably show us how the site would look in different browsers from within Freeway.

Not possible - how can you show what an Explorer user will see.

This is an age old problem that if they could crack it would probably earn SP more money than FW does.

D

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4

Adobe is offering that facility through the website I mentioned in my first post. I wonder if Softpress could do something similar and make it available through the preview section of Freeway. That sure would make Freeway interesting to an awful lot of potential customers.

Ashley

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5

make it available through the preview section of Freeway

Yes but their service is online with the might of Adobe behind it.

Are you suggesting that SP provide a similar online service - how would it be paid for?

D

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6

Adobe’s system runs multiple “headless” browsers on their server farm, converts what they each see into a bitmap, and then provides a nice way to view those from your browser. It’s very similar (although far superior) to BrowserCam or NetRenderer. BrowserCam costs $500/year, NetRenderer is free, but it’s not very convenient or performant. (It’s also in Germany, which can be handy to diagnose outages in parts of the network.)

Anyone who mounts such a service needs to have a way to pay for it. TANSTAAFL!

Walter

On Dec 11, 2012, at 10:11 AM, DeltaDave wrote:

make it available through the preview section of Freeway

Yes but their service is online with the might of Adobe behind it.

Are you suggesting that SP provide a similar online service - how would it be paid for?

D

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7

Whats more - Adobes offering is limited to certain Browsers - not ideal for a web developer who really needs greater scope.

So in your eyes SP would need to offer a better service than Adobe to be worthwhile.

D

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8

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious but couldn’t a service like this be financed by attracting new customers away from Adobe and other software developers because they want this feature? I’m not even convinced the real costs of operating such a service would be that excessive with the right planning.

My original point though was about the current difficulty in judging website appearance on different browsers. Seeing a site look fine in IE9 on one computer but not on another can cause a huge amount of wasted time. In this instance IE9 viewed via Parallels showed me errors in appearance but checked just now on the Windows laptop it looks perfect 8 and 9, while version 7 only the has the slightest imperfection on a rounded corner that won’t bother anybody.

Ashley

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Windows browser versions are such a snake pit! The issue is that if you are using IE 9 in “IE 8 Compatibility Mode”, you are not seeing what someone else would see in real IE 8, and if you’re looking at IE 9 on Vista, you’re not seeing IE 9 on Windows 7. Round and round the snake goes, eating its own tail!

BrowserCam costs so much because they use a bunch of real computers, each carefully maintained (and virus checked) at elderly levels of OS and IE, just like your customers use. I haven’t read what Adobe uses for theirs.

In any external view of this sort of operation, it is tempting to say “that couldn’t be all that hard/expensive to run” – but the problems are exponentially harder than you have summarized here, and they are manpower-intensive. The hardware could be outsourced to Amazon (that’s how I would build this) but you would still need a serious MS expert (not a button-clicker; someone who can hand-edit the Registry with Notepad if she has to) to make this anything other than another approximation of what your customers will see.

Personally, I have IE 8 in XP under VMWare, and I get in the car and go to Best Buy when I need to see something else. And personally, I make my sites with enough care that even if they are “wrong” in IE, they are at least readable and usable. I frankly don’t care at all if they are identical in all browsers. I have tried to educate my clients to the folly of that goal as well – mostly by charging them danger rates to attempt to reach it

Walter

On Dec 11, 2012, at 10:55 AM, Ashley wrote:

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious but couldn’t a service like this be financed by attracting new customers away from Adobe and other software developers because they want this feature? I’m not even convinced the real costs of operating such a service would be that excessive with the right planning.

My original point though was about the current difficulty in judging website appearance on different browsers. Seeing a site look fine in IE9 on one computer but not on another can cause a huge amount of wasted time. In this instance IE9 viewed via Parallels showed me errors in appearance but checked just now on the Windows laptop it looks perfect 8 and 9, while version 7 only the has the slightest imperfection on a rounded corner that won’t bother anybody.

Ashley

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10

I’ve just been looking at this and the problem was most likely caused by Parallels. After clearing the cache and resetting everything to default settings it looked fine except that it wasn’t showing the proper Open Sans font that is retrieved from Google via CSS.

When I clicked to allow intranet settings i.e. connect with the Mac part of the computer the font appeared correctly but the other cosmetic glitches emerged once again. From now on I’ll only check sites on a Windows machine and not rely on Parallels. Both computers have Windows 7 and run IE 9.

Ashley

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11

Both computers have Windows 7 and run IE 9.

And there you are with a restriction - IE9 is at 6.8% as of October with about half of them on Windoze 7.

So effectively you are seeing about 3.5% of the total by testing that way. Unfortunately is just isn’t enough for an accurate idea.

D

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12

When I was at Microsoft they launched a similar application/ service called Super Preview (http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565874.aspx). I had imagined it was backed by a sleek and shiny server farm somewhere that handled all of these requests until I happened to talk with one of the project team who showed me a regular office crammed with various old desktop PCs and Macs all buzzing away 24/7. This was early in the project and I suspect (certainly hope) they have retired these now for the rack-mounted servers.
It certainly makes you realise what you can do with scrounged computers and no budget. :slight_smile:

In terms of testing tools I’ve always found Net Renderer a good basic tool (http://netrenderer.com/) and created a batch tool for it that allows you to render the URL in all the browser versions at once (http://www.freewayactions.com/tools/netrenderer-overdrive/). That page has some useful bookmarklets as well that (when clicked) will render the current page in Net Renderer.
Regards,
Tim.

On 11 Dec 2012, at 15:17, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

Adobe’s system runs multiple “headless” browsers on their server farm, converts what they each see into a bitmap, and then provides a nice way to view those from your browser.

Experienced Freeway designer for hire - http://www.freewayactions.com

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13

I test my websites using an old XP, and VirtualBox, which lets you run different Windows OS’s for free. It runs pretty fast in my 2011 iMac i5 too, always a plus!

OSX Daily has a really easy tutorial here: Internet Explorer for Mac the Easy Way: Run IE 7, IE8, & IE9 Free in a Virtual Machine

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14

Also, Walters Best Buy trick work really well, I was just doing that the other day.

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