My cross browser testing setup 8/7/13

VirtualBox Screenshot

As web developers we have a moral obligation to make our sites accessible

¹ to as many people as possible. That means testing our sites in different browsers and on different devices.

This is my baseline testing setup:

The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome

², and Safari.
Lynx installed with MacPorts. Lynx is a text browser and it’s a great bit of software for understanding how screen readers and search bots interpret your site.
Internet Explorer 6 and newer running in VirtualBox. I use a single Windows 7 virtual machine with IETester to test old versions of Internet Explorer

³.
The Android browser using AndroVM in VirtualBox

⁴.
Mobile Safari on an iPhone and iPad

⁵.

If you’re working on an existing site, check the logs and see if you should be focusing your testing on a specific browser. You might find you have a lot of Blackberry or Nintendo Wii users you need to help.

⁶

Making content accessible across devices doesn’t mean our sites need to work the same everywhere. Graceful degradation and progressive enhancement are solid strategies for dealing with different browser capabilities. ↩
Testing in Opera is redundant now that it uses the same rendering engine as Google Chrome. ↩
Microsoft has a great site where you can download free Windows virtual machines with old versions of Internet Explorer. ↩
AndroVM has been replaced by a software package called Genymotion. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. For now, AndroVM still works fine. Alternatively, you could use the Android emulator in the Android SDK. ↩
If you don’t have an iPhone and iPad, you could use the simulator included in Xcode. ↩
Probably not. ↩