One of the things I dispise the most in web application development is testing different browsers. Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari 4, IE7, IE8, and my most hated browser IE6. I suppose now I also include the iPhone, Blackberry, Android (or MyTouch or whatever you call it now), and Palm. However, I put my displeasure aside simply because I have to. I can't be too upset since things continue to improve (think NN4 or IE5.5), but I sure don't love it.
Well, the joy of testing won't ever go away but a couple of coworkers of mine have shown me a tool that has helped tremendously (thank you Craig and Eric!). Xenocode has a browser emulation tool that has worked very well for us. Considering that you can't have IE6, IE7, and IE8 all installed on one system (same with some other browsers), a developer was left with one ugly choice...multiple systems. Multiple systems can be sliced several ways. From physical systems to dual boot or virtualization, the fact is that you have to maintain a lot for very little benefit. In fact, Microsoft even provides a monster virtual system downloads to support IE6, IE7 or IE8.
Enter Xenocode. I haven't dove into their virtualization and streaming methodology, but I can say that they have saved me time and energy maintaining other systems for testing. It does take a bit of time to get the the engine rolling (10 minutes or so the first time). For me, it's very worth the wait. Give it a shot sometime you want to view the world with IE6, Firefox 2, or Opera.
2 comments:
very good posting. thank you. :)
bathmate
You took the words right out of my mouth Chad)) The whole experience I get from the moments of testing my own apps in the different browsers is the most excitable thing! Some kind of fetish, someone may say. And at this time I found out that all of my web apps got the best performance via safari for windows 10 https://yepdownload.com/safari Never heard about they have a windows version before, but this is true and it works so fast and smooth! But can't approve that some more heavy web-apps will run as good as mine via this..
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