Testing in many renderers?

[Quboid]

This is an age old problem for me that's come up again on a new project. I'm doing an overall of a site, updating it with XHTML, CSS layout and some AJAX, and I need to test it in a variety of browsers. It is all valid XHTML and CSS, but bad rendering in IE6 isn't acceptable, regardless of who's fault it is. I figure I should support the following:

• Firefox (2 & 3, I don't know the Gecko versions)
  
• Internet Explorer (6 or 6.5, 7 & 8b2)
  
• Opera (8, 9, 9.5)
  
• Safari (all)
  

Are there any others?

I can only really install one of each on this system without messing it up. I use Fx3 normally and I have O9.5 and IE7, although I might try IE8b2. I could have a few virtual machines, that takes a lot of memory and disk space, not that I'm short on either. Also, I've always had a hard time getting virtual machines to connect to the network, even to the physical machine :blush: Is there any other options? Supporting other OSes would be nice, Linux has a few, Konqueror for example (although this may be the same renderer as Safari, I know little of either).

[mollick2]

http://browsershots.org

[Quboid]

Wow, that's pretty cool. It's not quite what I need as I can't test JS/AJAX and presumably turnaround is quite slow but it could be very useful. Thank you.

[Jerry Grey Member]

For IE you can use IETester.

Also you can use virtual pc (or something else) setup with the different versions.

[markwolfe Veteran]

Linux options would be easy enough with a LiveCD, since you have had connectivity problems with VMs

[Borbus]

Firefox and Opera render the same on all platforms. The only thing you need to be aware of is fonts, but your CSS should degrade gracefully when fonts are not present anyway. For IE you can install IE7 and then install this: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE to give you IE6. There isn't any point testing Firefox 2 but if you want to there is no reason you can't run Fx2 and 3 on the same PC.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

And to get a more consistent font size, you can use font-size-adjust (This forces the lower case letters of whatever font is chosen to match, so if you design for Verdana and the fallback is smaller, it will enlarge it to match)

Edit: If the font-size is 20px, and the font-size-adjust is 0.5, then the lower case letters will be 10px high, regardless of what font the user agent ends up picking.

[Mike]

I have a VM with the XP IE test image you can download. That has IE8b2 (so in effect IE7 too), FF2/3, Opera 9.2 and the latest safari. My main desktop has Opera 9.5 and IE6 which i primarily do my checking in then fix any bugs in the VM image's browsers

[sweetsam]

I use http://www.browsrcamp.com/ for testing safari on a mac and vm's for IE versions