em:two; the musings of a casual geek

As a designer and developer of websites I've had the same problem that everyone else had, trying to test my websites in IE6 as well as the standard Vista install of IE7, and more recently I've had to test in IE8 beta too. That on top of Safari, Netscape, Opera, good old Firefox and now Chrome. Headache!

As anyone with Vista knows, IE6 just won't run on the OS, it's like getting me to swim more than one length; reasonably impossible. The old solution back in XP days was to use the powerhouse that was http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE but again, Vista kicks it out and doesn't like it.

So, the options?  Well you can always reinstall XP, but personally (get ready, I'll get a right pasting for this) I actually like Vista. I'm runing a machine wealthy of resource so I hear what people say about it being slow on some machines but if you have the power then use it I say. You never saw Lion-o having a word with Tigra along the lines of "nah, today I'll not use the sword, I'll just do it with the old fisticuffs" did you? Put those tools to work I say, here here.

So anyway, back to the options.

For a good while I was using the greatly received Microsoft Virtual PC solution which did work well, but it was awkward to set it up to receive a local connection (for testing from your local IIS or whatever development server you use) and it was a sap on the old pc resources. Still if you want to try it:

Microsoft Virtual PC download: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/virtualpc/default.mspx

Virtual Hard Drives (including IE6, 7 and 8): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en

How to network it up: http://pingv.com/blog/glhines/200712/browser-testing-ie6  

So, I figured that option was workable but not ideal and I refuse to buy another machine to do the IE6 testing on.  Whilst I was digging around I found a nifty little solution for testing multiple IE versions in a browser (http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/) but it only serves up results from an online webpage, not a local host.

Finally after surfing around for a good while I found and installed this: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage which appears to have solved all my problems!

IETester lets you open up several tabs within one browser window with each tab representing any IE browser from IE5.5 right up to IE8 Beta 2, and to be fair it does seem to faithfully represent the way each browser natively renders any given webpage and it's CSS.  I'd even go so far as to say it works with Javascript fairly well too based on that fact that this here blog site of mine uses jQuery and jQuery corners for the rounded divs and it renders fine in all except IE5.5, which is to be expected.

So, this is easily the best solution that I've found after my time consuming searching and I'd urge anyone that needs to test multiple versions of IE under a Vista OS to give it a shot.

Right well, further to this post I've now downloaded the eagerly anticipated Google Chrome and had a bit of a play on it.

First impression: very impressed.

Let's put aside the concerns around privacy that we all have (omnibar is ace, but what's it sending and where?) mainly because I don't know enough about it to argue a point. I'm looking at this thing from two angles; 1. as a designer and 2. as a layman user.  And on both counts it seems to come out on top.

Ok so what do I like?

• Omnibar - a bit like Firefox 3's "Awesome Bar" but on steroids. Great bit of kit. Allows you to instantly search for anything directly from your address bar. Ok, this has been around a while not not as elegantly as this. Really really good, expecially if you had the classic Google search page as your homepage. Bye bye.
• New tab - this will probably end up being alot of users' preference for their homepage setup. It shows your most recently bookmarked pages, the most frequently visited page and also the last set of tabs closed. Great stuff, and because you can search directly from the Omnibar it serves alot of purposes. Impressive from a user point of view.
• Performance - I was impressed by this alot, I was curious as to how the new tab = new process setup would work out and it does seem to workout just fine. To be fair, I've  good connection to the net at home and don't really struggle to open pages anyway. But I guess time will tell with this, especially for those people who use web apps more and more such as Google Docs etc.
• The source viewer is a good rig, it opens the page source in a new tab and it looks fresh and clean. But this feature is massively enhanced byt the "Inspect Element" feature. For those of us who use FF "View Selection Source" it's a fancier, awseome(r) version of that. It opens up what looks like a source editor and displays the elements of the page in a collapsable format, like a proper source editor does, and also when you select a particular element in the source it highlights it on the page in a fancy yellow colour. Lovely job!
• Standard compliance - hmmmm it seems to render things like FF doesand not IE which can only be good news. I tested a few IE hacks out on it to see if it was affected by them and it wasn't, unless I missed something!
• Downloads - much like the setup in FF but done very very elegantly. I likes.

A couple of annoyances but literally tiny things:

• Home button is missing when you first setup the browser. Not a problem because you can add it via the options menu but for people not as well versed in this sort of thing it could be a small pain. That said, those people in that category are probably not gonna be moving from IE anytime soon anyway.
• jQuery round corners causes the same black corners that it causes in Safari. Not a problem really, just something that you'll notice if you're viewing my blog in Safari or Chrome. Must get round to fixing that. EDIT - Fixed thanks to the newest version of the .js file.

I'm sure that people who are far better versed than me in browser design and development will have strong view on the browser, but this is just what I think!

So, a very quick review of a very big application. But my first impressions are that of a very solid browser that does what you expect it to. And it didn't crash once.

Will I be moving from Firefox 3 though?

Maybe later.

Now I'm literally no expert when it comes to browser design, but I am a decent designer and know my way around development code too.  So, on the back of downloading IE8 for a play (installing as we speak) I'm also on the lookout for the release of Google Chrome, the new browser from the labs at Google.

I've read alot about it and it does look very interesting. Whether it'll reignite the browser war remains to be seen but I'm hoping that it conforms to web standards when it comes to CSS et al because another browser for testing in is frankly a pain otherwise! To be honest, Google are normally all about quality so I'm actually expecting it to perform very well. 

I'll download it a bit later today when it gets released and we'll have a see what it's like in comparison to the fantastic FF3 and the as yet untested IE8.

Gotta be better than IE7 though right? 

A bit of an update to this I've just been having a browse round the new CSS3 specs and stumbled across one of the most recent approvals by the W3C which is an interesting addition of rounded corners (or border radius). Alot of you will have seen this before I'm sure but that, and in fact the whole site, is well worth a visit.

To be honest, I love the ease of the CSS method but the on page rendering doesn't really look as elegant as the jQuery solution. It's a shame too that Microsoft and Opera / Netscape have yet to update their browsers to recognise this new CSS property.

Ah well, we'll get there eventually. 

Well I've been waiting (geek) for IE8 to reach the second beta so I could have a play around with it. I'm interested purely from a designer's perspective as I'm in the same boat as the gazillion other designers out there who have to hack up their code to make IE (normally 6 but 7 doesn't make the grade either) do what you ask it to.

We all love Firefox and the latest addition of FF3 is frankly superb. The "Awesome Bar" does exactly what it says on the tin and for everything else you want FF to do there's likely a suitable add on that will do the job.

At time of writing I've just read this article and have yet to download the beta for a play but if the article is to be believed, Microsoft have finally addressed IE's markup inconsitencies and have made it stand up as a real FF rival in the eyes of a designer. Course, they've blatantly downloaded FF3 and seen what it can do, then made their browser do the same but at least we can hope that in a few years we only have to write one lot of code for all the browsers out there.

I'll save judgement until I've had a play and for the moment it's just another browser to add to the constantly growing testing list.