[web] Testing Compatibilities

I don't. W3C's Browser Stats say that 67.5% of current users use IE6, 19.6% use FF, 6% use IE5, and 3% use a Mac with Safari/FF. These are the only browsers that you should really need to worry about.

My 2 cents...

The only old versions that you need are old versions of Internet Explorer. See this forums FAQ for links to a howto on installing multiple versions of IE under Windows or Linux. Users of other browsers tend to be a bit more tech savvy, so they are the kind of people that update when a new version gets out. Personally, I test my pages in IE5, 5.5, 6.0, FireFox, Opera and Links (text browser). I have yet to see a page that works in all these but fails to render in Safari or Konqueror or any other decent browser.

I second what Sander said - it is probably only necessary to test on IE 5.5 (possibly 5.0, although few people use it).

We commonly test our stuff on 5.5 - in most respects it behaves similarly to 6.0 anyway.

As far as other browsers goes, I only test on current versions. I know it's lazy.

Safari is the biggest problem, as I don't have a Mac. On Mac there is no point testing on anything except Safari. The Mac versions of IE are a joke - so broken that there's no point in even *trying* to support them - plus few people use them.

All Gecko-based* browsers render pages very similarly, so it's not usually necessary to test in more than one unless you're doing something unusual like making a Mozilla extension.

AOL's new Windows-only Netscape browser is actually some sort of weird two-headed monster which can embed either Gecko or MSHTML (IE's renderer). It's probably unnecessary to test with this monstrosity if you're confident your site works with IE and Mozilla.

Mark

* Gecko is Mozilla's HTML rendering engine used by browsers such as Mozilla, Firefox, Galeon, Camino, K-Meleon and Netscape.