In the interest of browser-compatibility checking, and given limited resources, is it worthwhile to test my HTML 4/CSS 2 web applications and sites with older versions of Firefox, or is it sufficient to test with the current version (v3.6 as at the time of writing)?
If I need to test against older versions, why? What are the things that I need to look out for?
UPDATE 1: This applies to a generally available audience and we can assume the browser usage patterns are the same as for the general public.
As a general rule, test your application in as many different environments as you can. It's never a BAD idea to test it against an older version of a browser.
Of course, given time limits and realistic requirements, you may want to limit the scope of your tests. For example, unless you're creating an application for the government, you usually won't need to test anything below Internet Explorer 6.
As for Firefox, the 2.x release was when it started to become really popular. It's easy to imagine that there are many people out there still on Firefox 2.x. The main thing you need to watch out for is differences with the way CSS is handled. Older browsers may render certain CSS tags differently or just plain don't have support for some of them.
I usually do check in older browsers, and follow this list http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ of A grade browsers. Unless it's just a very quick site I test in all A Grade Browsers.
The main reason to check different browsers is to make sure that the different users get the same experience and that your site actually works. Some obvious things are css fixes, javascript / ajax fixes, or things not working, PNG transparencies not working in IE6 and so on.
As said before, you need to know your demographics and what the site is used for. If it's an internal site, or one where only a limited people have access to it, and you know they don't use IE 7 or lower, or the older versions of Firefox, then there is really no need to cross check. But I'd say for the general public websites, stick with A grade browsers and you're pretty good.
If you want to test with a lot of different browsers, this free service might be helpful for you:
http://browsershots.org/
(Adobe had a commercial service in the past, but they shut it down in 2013.)
If a significant fraction of your intended audience use the old versions, yes.
Is this a generally available application, or will it be restricted to one organisation? If the latter, then the corporate policies on browser support will determine this.
First, find out what the browser demographics to your site are like.
That should drive any compatibility testing.
If you find that you have many users with older versions of Firefox, then it would be worthwhile.
You might find out that some other browser you had not considered should be a focus.
Good question!
If your application targets less tech-savvy people, I'd say a basic test against 2 is still mandatory. I've seen plenty of machines still running 2 because of turned off auto-updates and such.
Related
We have started to use Lighthouse to track the improvements we make to our sites. While this seems to work quite well for desktop sites, i.e. we see the values improve over time and as we make changes, for mobile sites the values remain consistently low. We do repeat the tests and use the best of three, but still.
Below, we have the results of the New York Times mobile site that appears to perform badly vis-a-vis the desktop site. The other two are sites of ours, the main site and the third one being our own.
Browsing the site (as well as the NYT, of course) this apparent bad performance cannot be felt at all.
The test procedure:
run same test three times for each site
mobile
no PWA
incognito mode
Now, while initially enthusiastic about Lighthouse's capability to evaluate a site by attributing aggregated figures that are easy to digest by management, we have the impression that they are not actually useful as they don't correspond to the users' reality and don't change even though we make changes.
Also, this being a Single Page Application, the first load of the page may take some more time, but any further navigation is quasi-instantaneous. We could not find a Lighthouse feature to take this into account.
No, you can't really rely on Lighthouse. As you've observed, well known fast websites perform badly in tests. While there are some reasons for this, it won't help you measure the actual loading speed. Caching being an important factor. Lazy-loading sometimes is confused as not yet loaded. So even if your website is loaded, Lighthouse might detect missing pieces and deem it not yet loaded.
Pingdom is great for that, and provides you with the options to test different regions, which I believe to be more realistic than one server fits all.
Also the Legacy version of GTmetrix is great because it points you directly to what improvements you can make but it tests only from Canada (unless you buy the PRO version). It takes caching into account.
I have been using PSI for mobile on our sites and worked well. Atleast mobile score was always better than lab data & my motivation was report was consistent on some external sites like https://covid19.ca.gov/.
Coming to tool works well for initial load but does not take into affect for one page app since cls is continuous evaluation has user scroll through CLS changes that is not simulated in tool. That is where field data differs.
Thanks,
I don't know if I should ask this here, but I really need your opinion.
I read and read many online articles about why you should don't care about old Internet Explorer versions (because it is really outdated and insecure etc). I have taken seriously all those articles and I started to don't care about Internet Explorer <= 11 when I redesigned and re-launched my websites.
Now, it's 2018 and I need to re-design my websites and add new features (because I got a lot of user feedback, and I have a lot of exciting ideas). And because I start it from the beginning I want to think again about this. I analyzed my stats and I'm still getting hits from IE8, IE7, IE6 and... IE5.5 (Windows 98 & ME)!
I know these versions are really outdated, insecure, but there are some people using old versions and old operating systems. I know I shouldn't care about these versions, but I really care about my visitors and their experience on my website (maybe there are people who live in the mountains or in poor villages, and they have a dial-up connection - why not?).
If there are such kind of persons, then:
Is there any reason why should I not create my new website to work even in Internet Explorer 5.5?
Why should I not care about webpage size, to be loaded fast even on dial-up or low broadband (Cable, GPRS etc)?
Thank you!
I think it's not generally a bad idea to consider IE when creating a new website, but there are some aspects you must consider.
You should do extra work to support IE, which includes more time and effort in the development. So you must ask yourself, is it really worth it?
Also you might ignore a lot of new APIs and features of JavaScript and CSS, to support older versions of IE. So you are probably affecting user experience of a large amount of your users, for a small section of them which are using IE.
Or you might use some libraries to detect browser support for certain features or using conditional comments (again, extra work to do).
Another solution might be to show a specific page to the IE users and encourage them to use a newer browser, which probably has no effect to a person who is still using IE5 in 2018!
Generally I think there is no complete answer to this question. It really depends on the goal, time and budget of the project.
Many big website (google.com, apple.com, microsoft.com) are never validated. When the big shots don't do it, is there a reason why others should?
w3.org provide a page dedicated to people asking just that question, it's here.
Of course places like Google and Microsoft are there to appeal and should all be consistent across browsers. The w3 does have some good points
Using standard, interoperable markup and stylesheets, on the other hand, offers a much greater chance of having one's page handled consistently across platforms and user-agents. Indeed, most developers creating rich Web applications know that reliable scripting needs the document to be parsed by User-Agents without any unexpected error, and will make sure that their markup and CSS is validated before creating a rich interactive layer.
When surveyed, a large majority of Web professionals will state that validation errors is the first thing they will check whenever they run into a Web styling or scripting bug.
Another very important point is maintenance. A strictly valid XHTML document as much easier to maintain than a bowl full of HTML tag soup. Trust me.
We must remember that the markup is there as a data format. The way a browser renders this markup is what's generally important to a user.
Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury?
They are probably validated, but need to support older browsers (like IE6), so comptability-code is added.
Just because someone else doesn't, doesn't mean it's not a good thing. When you validate, you not only find out if your pages are well-formed, but you also track down bugs in your code, make the web pages easier to maintain and your code is more likely to work cross browser as well with future browsers. In addition to this, it shows that you take your job serious and that you have a good habit of trying to generate quality code.
Staying strictly within a known range of syntax (or technologies, in general) is good for optimizing maintenance costs, because all technologies you depend on (browsers in this case) are very well tested for the standard-conforming cases (subset of HTML/CSS/JS) only and are only randomly tested beyond.
Suppose I'm writing a 2d tile based MMORPG.
Furthermore suppose I hate flash.
Lastly, suppose I only need my code to run in the latest safari, latest firefox, and latest chrome.
What are the limits to what I can and can't do? (Are there examples of good game engines that only require a recent web browser)?
Look into HTML5 Canvas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element
The latest versions of the browsers you mention already support it.
Check out the Unity3D engine: http://www.unity3d.com
Cross-browser, cross-platform, although your users would have to download the unity browser plugin...
There's also the Raphaël javascript library...it does a very nice job of abstracting a lot of the heavy lifting you'd have to do otherwise! The memory footprint seems decently light as well (from my small-scale playing around with it anyway).
For something that works for the user, OOBE (without add-ins etc); Javascript is probably the only unified functionality that exists between all browsers.
The browser is surprisingly quite capable (at least Chrome is), this is something that Google Chrome is attempting to promote (see http://www.chromeexperiments.com/). Notice some however, that experiments are often laggy or unworkable in other web browsers.
As for a list of things that are and aren't capable; that would take a fair while to compile.
In regards specifically to a 2D tile based game, I wouldn't say it isn't possible, but it may be quite difficult to create. As mentioned before, most browsers (apart from the stand-out; Google Chrome), suffer from limited resources. Therefore resources wise, it may be difficult to implement and would defiantly require a lot of requirement fore planning.
Java applets are also possible...
You could also move to 3D. While it does require a plug-in (although is being integrated into Chrome), the results are undeniable.
"O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser." http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/. The video is quite amazing actually -- especially the live map editing (e.g. removing sprites).
I'm putting together some virtual machines to test different browsers and I'm wondering if there is any compelling reason to be able to test the same version of IE on different versions of Windows. (i.e. IE8 on XP and Vista) I'm mostly talking about testing CSS to make sure it "looks right" across browsers, but if there were major differences in JavaScript I would want to know that too.
Are different versions of IE "generally the same" on different versions of Windows? Thanks!
The time and cost of testing different versions of windows would be better spent in other places. This would be one of the last things I would look at when looking for rendering issues.
I agree with both people who have answered previously, despite the fact that they disagree with one another.
In general, IE will act very largely the same across all versions of windows. However, there can be (and are) some occassional subtle differences. Whether these are important are not is up to you.
For the great majority of websites, I wouldn't bother with it. But for very precise web applications where you're using something like complex javascript, or if you require layout to be correct to the pixel for some reason, then it could be worth it. I'm thinking of cases where people are generating os-type applications in JavaScript where the DOM is really being pushed around, and where exact layout and flawless event-handling is critical.
Yes, I am currently testing something out and have varying results between XP and Vista.
--assuming you already have both platforms.
No, I would stick to testing on the current (IE8) and previous (IE7), unless it is a requirement to support older versions. These browsers should render the same across different versions of windows.
I personally dont bother with IE6, the sooner that is gone, the better
I would think there would be very limited cases where you'll notice a difference in IE between Windows versions. One example where you would is a Google toolbar bug I've seen in IE6 that renders html forms unusable. That bug seems to go away when you upgrade to IE8. But that problem is more Google Toolbar than IE.
Other differences you run into may be security or plug-in related. But in the default IE configurations I don't think you'll see any differences in rendering.