I have focussed on server side development for a few years and now I am branching out into client-side application construction.
I must say that I am finding it difficult to make the client-side application look the same across multiple browsers....
Are there any decent online resources that can aid the faster learning of cross-browser compatibility principles...
For the HTML/CSS part, I find that if you follow the following two rules, things usually work out fairly well:
Write standards-compliant, semantic HTML. Focus on semantically correct document structure first, then use CSS to lay it out the way you want. Only change the HTML if you feel you absolutely have to. Avoid layout patterns that are hard to get right with HTML and CSS, and if you have to, A List Apart contains tons of articles about these things.
Test in all the browsers. If you're serious about web development, you need a bunch of test setups; at the very least, I recommend you have these ready: Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 9 (this means you have to use virtual machines, as there is no way to realistically simulate different IE versions on the same OS install); Firefox 3.6 and 7 (or whatever the current version is); the most recent Google Chrome; a somewhat older Chrome or Chromium (I use chromium from debian); Opera (because it does not share any important components with any other browser). If you can afford a Mac, add FF/Mac and Safari to the mix. If you develop for mobile devices, you need to test on those as well - at least Android and iOS.
If you have to support older Internet Explorer versions (7 or, gasp, 6), then conditional comments are your friend - my usual strategy is to make a design that works on all the other browsers first, and then add one or more special style sheets in conditional comments (so that only IE loads them) that 'fix' things for these broken browsers.
For the javascript part, the sane thing to do is go with a framework that polishes the various pecularities away - jQuery is probably the most popular one at the moment.
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My team is working on a new site which should be cross browser compatible (IE 8+, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera) and cross platform compatible (Desktop, Tablet, Smartphone).
We've been looking at a lot of the new methodologies for achieving this such as HTML 5, responsive design, using JS libraries that abstract a lot of the browser mess away from the user but since the browsers and even MVVM, but the one major issue that I've been facing is how fast the browsers are changing. With both Chrome and Firefox using a model of continuous delivery it becomes harder and harder to test. And from the looks of it other sites have the same problem (it seems like it's hit or miss these days as to whether a site will work in a particular browser)
What suggestions do you or your team have for testing new browsers as they come out?
What things do you do during development to decrease possibility of having code break when a browser update comes out?
And how do you decide when you will or will drop support for a browser version?
NOTE: I've altered the order of your questions to leave the longer answer at the end.
Your questions
What suggestions do you or your team have for testing new browsers as they come out?
Actually, as you said, Chrome and Firefox are continuosly delivering so it eases the process. The last version you have is mostly always the version the user has.
For any other browser (and Chrome and Firefox old versions) just select a version of each and act as a "high pass filter", testing any version up from the one you selected.
How do you decide when you will or will drop support for a browser version?
Take a look at the statistics of browser use. There are many resources such as statcounter, w3counter, w3cschools, or wikimedia. If possible, add an analytics tracker to your page and you will have data about what devices, platforms, browsers, and versions of them the visitors use to access the site.
What things do you do during development to decrease possibility of having code break when a browser update comes out?
The key is to use a well defined methodology, based on the existing standards. Continue reading for a personal recommendation.
Workflow to ease cross-browsing
Step 1: Bootstrapping
At first decide: Graceful degredation versus progressive enhancement. Both are valid techniques, but makes sense using the first to fix existing projects and the second for newly created projects.
Then select libraries to avoid typing existing code, focusing on the 3 languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. HTML5 (+CSS3) is the better choice today but support for older browsers must be provided. The following libraries ease supporting them:
modernizr for feature detection and conditional loading of js or css.
jQuery for ajax and dom related tasks.
normalize.css for normalize default browser styles, rather than just "resetting" them.
Notice that all of the js libraries listed above allow custom builds, an important thing when performance matters.
Html5 Boilerplate provides a strong template from which start the layout. It includes modernizr, jQuery, and normalize.css. Its github repository is a good resource to learn a lot about cross-browsing techniques. This article on its wiki has a nice set of links to start learning.
Step 2: Do the work
Designs should be mobile-first and responsive. This article on html5rocks introduces well why and how.
While "doing the work":
Follow the w3c standards. Avoids using hacks, specially CSS hacks, when possible. Review often the HTML5 specification as it is pretty unstable.
Take care of ECMAScript 5 features when writing javascript. Rely on libraries to avoid code breaks caused by deficient browser implementations. Do not extend the DOM.
Automate tests when possible. Layout and specially layout polishing, including animations, are manually tested cause it's quicker but UI functionalities like form submision can be perfectly tested with automated tests.
Use tools to ease tasks. Chrome + devtools or Firefox + firebug are the very basic must-use, but there are a bunch of tools to ease cross-browsing tests, even automating those tests.
Annex: Tools and resources
Cross-browser testing
Browserstack is just awesome. Allows testing on all devices, platforms, browsers, and versions.
Browserling is an alternative to browserstack. It is developed and maintained by Peteris Krumins and James Halliday, both recognized members of the node.js community and well-known developers. They also published a tool to automate the process called testling-ci, but this is only relevant if using node.js on the back-end.
modern.ie provides tools to ease testing on internet explorer. Developed by Microsoft, the site provides live testing through browserstack and downloadable virtual machine images with pre installed software.
adaptability testing for "responsive design"
respon.si is an online tool meant to test the visually appearance of layouts. It allows selecting a resolution so it's useful for responsive layouts testing. Notice that any other tool to select a resolution can easily do the same.
What suggestions do you or your team have for testing new browsers as they come out?
As part of our definition of done we support the following desktop browsers:
IE8+
Firefox 3.6
Firefox (latest)
Chrome (latest)
Safari 6
The support of the latest versions of Firefox/Chrome is fine because they both provide automatic updates, and so if anybody has a problem on an older version of the browser, it's out of our hands and they should update.
The majority of Firefox/Chrome testing can be done on our machines, but there are obviously discrepancies with how the different OS' handle fonts, and some quirks with native form elements that may or may not carry over to versions on Windows.
To test Firefox versions on OS X I use the "Install all Firefoxes" script that I created, to allow me to run multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side.
Our development team uses Ubuntu and Mac OS as their environments, so we have a dedicated machine with virtual machines for each version of IE, and Chrome/Firefox on Windows, and Safari 6 on OS X.
These virtual machines were setup using the images provided by modern.ie. We're remotely accessing the machine with the virtual machines on so that we don't need to break our workflow and go to another machine.
What things do you do during development to decrease possibility of having code break when a browser update comes out?
The obvious things are avoiding CSS hacks, and making sure that the HTML/CSS/JavaScript that is written meets our code standards, and our definition of done.
If we're using experimental CSS features, we ensure that we're providing vendor prefixed and lastly w3 definitions of properties:
-moz-foo: bar;
-ms-foo: bar;
-o-foo: bar;
-webkit-foo: bar;
foo: bar;
Obviously this introduces some technical debt, but if you're using a preprocessor for your CSS, the overhead of this can be reduced.
We keep a separate stylesheet for IE and load it using conditional comments, so that we can fix problems in IE without affecting the integrity of the rest of the front-end for other browsers. There's a movement lately to moving this in to a shame.css though, which you can read about here: http://csswizardry.com/2013/04/shame-css/
And how do you decide when you will or will drop support for a browser version?
Google Analytics. Segmenting by browser type in Google Analytics is very useful. When usage for a particular browser drops below 10% it's a good time to stop developing new features for it.
You could do something as radical as throwing away all of your hacks/styles for that browser too, but for a smoother transition (and to encourage people to upgrade) it's better to simply stop developing for the older browser, and maybe conditionally display a message.
We dropped support for IE7 recently, and now visitors using IE7 will get a message telling them to upgrade, and they don't get any more fixes or additional features.
Mobile is a whole other kettle of fish, and if your site is completely responsive it's an extra layer of pain.
We've got a bunch of different size/version Android devices, a couple of old iPhones and an iPad kicking around the office that we use for testing the majority of mobile browsers on.
Obviously there are differences with screen size, DPI, browser version etc. The best you can do in this regard is cater for the most common case, and fix any issues as they surface.
design and develop with web standards. validate the web platform. all of the libs/solutions/etc., already listed are phenomenal and quite useful, but if you stick to standards, you'll find you need those libs less and less...at least for gracefully degrading user agent support. i find i use them more and more for progressive enhancement.
I know there are programs like dreamweaver but none of them has significant success when it comes to creating automatic cross browser compatible html and css codes.
I was wondering, is there a framework or program that i can use for creating more cross browser compatible HTML and CSS layout ?
Currently, i am using a virtual windows xp version running on vmware to check how web pages looks in IE6, and manually using Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
What you want doesn't really exist as many have said. I do try to safe myself most of the hassle you describe by consciously using only things that have proven to be widely supported and with which I have good experiences.
The perfect solution doesn't exist but here are a few things to consider that could make your life easier:
Use a css reset so all default browser styles are gone.
Force yourself to write HTML that validates against a doctype. Personally I use only
XHTML 1.1 (which is very strict) but gives high compatibility in most browsers.
Use only fonts that are common and widely supported.
Limit your use of javascript to the absolutely necessary, and use jQuery where you can, as it will "often iron out differences for you". (suggested by Andrew Barber)
This way you'll end up with web sites that have a very high chance to be cross browser compatible
There is no reliable, broadly applicable solution to this beyond testing, testing, testing. The issues are so complex that it's essentially impossible to build a tool that could do this for anything close to every possible difference between the browsers.
Incidentally; there is a tool called IETester that you can use to be able to run multiple, previous versions of IE.
EDIT: You (motto) and others have noted issues with IETester. While I have not experienced issues with it myself, that could very well be because I have simply not used it to help me with layouts that use things which happen to be buggy in IETester.
Comments below note that the Developer Toolbar in IE9 permits us to use the IE7/IE8 rendering engines. I would guess this to be a more reliable way to test layouts for those browsers, and I plan to begin using that instead, myself.
I will then likely keep using IETester just for assuring basic usability for IE6.
Is there any single framework with which I can build a css3, html5 website that is compatible for all browsers including IE7 and later? Can http://html5boilerplate.com/ boilerplate help me in this?
You will never get the IE7 or IE8 rendering engine to achieve full compatibility with HTML5, CSS3, and other modern technologies. They are simply not capable of it.
However there are some hacks, tools and plugins which can get you part of the way.
Tools like Modernizr will help you by allowing you to detect which features are supported, to give your site a chance to work around it.
jQuery is a great library anyway, but is particularly good in this context because it abstracts a lot of browser differences away from the developer. Some things are easy in most browsers but a real pain in IE; jQuery takes a lot of that kind of stuff and makes it easy regardless.
Dean Edwards' IE7.js and Selectivzr are both Javascript libraries that give IE support for lots of the CSS selectors which were missing in older versions. This allows you to write your stylesheets without worrying so much about what IE supports. (IE7.js also fixes a number of IE's other glitches and missing features too)
CSS3Pie is a hack for IE that adds support for CSS border-radius, gradients and box-shadow.
There are in fact a whole load of hacks along these lines, all aimed at adding features to older versions of IE which it is missing. Modernizr's website has a big list of them here: https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Browser-Polyfills
However there is one big caveat to all of this. Speed. IE<=8 is a slow browser. It has a slow Javascript engine. Virtually all of these hacks are javascript based. You might get away with running a few of them on any given site, but trying to use enough of them to give IE anything like full support for HTML5 and CSS3 will slow the browser down to the point of being unusable.
There is one other angle to approach this question though, and that's Google's Frame plugin for IE. This basically installs the entire Google Chrome browser engine into IE. The user is still running the IE shell, but the web page is rendered as it would be in an up-to-date version of Chrome.
This sounds great, but of course it isn't perfect. The main down-side of it is that the end user has to install it manually onto their computer, which means that you as a web developer have no real control over whether it's there or not. So its not something you can just add to your site and expect everything to magically work.
Finally, you may also be interested in CanIUse.com, which gives browser support tables for various features, allowing you to see at a glance what is and what isn't supported in various versions of each browser.
HTML 5 is more an umbrella term for a variety of technologies than any one thing or framework. Really, any implementation you do should degrade gracefully-- and that is what makes the site browser compatible. Detect what the browser supports, and then have alternatives that are legacy friendly.
Check out: http://accessites.org/site/2007/02/graceful-degradation-progressive-enhancement/
And: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/detect.html
Good luck.
Modernizr is an open-source JavaScript library that helps you build the next generation of HTML5 and CSS3-powered websites.
MS is including it in the ASP.net MVC template projects
html5boilerplate won't help you.
As others have said html5 and css3 are very broad terms, there's no framework that implements all of the features provided by both of these. In fact they are not equally supported in browsers that say that they support them. And more, even W3C guys (who write the specs for html5 and css3) are not yet established on what features they will include or what steps will be required to implement them. You get the idea...
But.. if you narrow your requirements to some specific features, like video, audio tags, canvas drawing, nifty css effects, File API, or others, you CAN find frameworks that implement (or try to mimic) them with available technologies in cross-browser manner (more or less).
I am in the process of updating my business website and I've decided to use HTML5/CSS3 (with some PHP) for the whole thing and it works fantastic in every new browser (IE9, FF6, O11, S5, C13) with or without JS.
Now I am not sure what I should do about every other browser version. I imagine I have a small amount of leeway with most of the browsers (atleast the previous version) except IE8 (I have the IE shiv, but it doesn't cover non-js browsers.). Most of the features degrade nicely, but there will always be issues with older browsers.
I know nonJS browsers are probably a minority, but it would be nice
to cover them as well
This list is ordered in the order of current preference to cover the
largest number of browsers(nonJS/JS) but time to implement hasn't been
considered.
Only considering web-browsers, plan is for a mobile site for mobile browsers
Here is the list:
Build a really dodge version of the site using tables^, etc. and redirect the users there if they have an old version of the browser (server-side) and have a warning on there about upgrading.
Use Javascript to fix up the bits they don't work (like the shiv). This doesn't really cover the nonJS browsers which as stated are probably a minority.
Build a static old browser page to redirect the old browser users to a page with links to upgrade download links. This is a real copout solutions, but is quick to implement
Assume the only users that have old browsers are IE users, and use conditional comments to implement one of the previous options. Assumptions are always bad
Pretend users have the most upto date browsers and make no attempt to fix the site at all. Not really a practical option
Rebuild the website for HTML4 and use it accross the site. Bit of a waste of current work. As well as it looks a bit dissappointing if a webdeveloper has a site using old technologies, which was the driving force for the upgrade
What are your thoughts/solutions to the HTML4/5 limbo? Is there anything you've done in current projects to combat this?
Cheers,
Steve.
P.S. Being a member of the 'I hate IE6 and don't care for it's existance' club, I'm pretending that IE6 (or less) never existed.
Update (to clarify)
^ - by tables, I mean are really slapped together version of the current website, using either a table/non-table based layout. But something that may not look pretty when the source is viewed, it's really just there to fill the compatibility void.
It's perfectly acceptable to have features in some browsers and no features for an older browser. See Here.
However, it should be noted that whenever a fix is doable, you should have it. Unless a website is a JavaScript based app, it should be working without JavaScript, note that working != working perfectly.
if you have a hover state with a cool transition, which Chrome 23423 will support, but IE7 won't, then you can either emulate it using Modernizr and jQuery, or leave it as is, and IE7 won't enjoy the goodness. BooHoo.
You must however, give older browser users a message to encourage them to upgrade to a better ones, especially talking about IE<=7.
You built the website in the wrong direction.
If you want to support older versions, instead of building a cutting edge website and then trying to get it to work in older browsers, you need to build a basic site that works everywhere, then use advanced CSS and Javascript feature detection to add features for the newest browsers.
What would be the process for ensuring that the code works as expected across multiple browsers. What would be the best answer?
Be XHTML compliant (w3.org validator)
Be CSS compliant (w3.org validator)
Use a JavaScript library that is cross-browser compatible (less direct call to JavaScript as possible)
Test, test, test during development. Not at the end!
Avoid bleeding edge code.
Yeah, I know, many of you will hate that answer. And if you've never worked in a large enterprise environment, you'll think I'm a Luddite. However, I can't tell you how many times the requirements I've been given have specifically listed "No HTML5" or "No CSS3" elements simply because the client was paranoid about IE6 working exactly as the others did.
The obvious overall answer is testing, but I'd go one step further. If you're worried about 100% operation in all browsers, you have to define your standards. For example, if you have to code back to IE6, do you have to worry about mimicking rounded corners, which is always a hack on IE6 and below? Or, will the client accept progressive enhancement such as square corners for those on browers from the dark ages and rounded for the rest of us? Does the client specify fonts that can't be told apart when pulling the page up side-by-side, or do they understand that browsers use different font rendering engines? Is it ok to work just in IE6, or do you have to also support quirks mode? What about rendering with a screen reader (accessibility) or without CSS or Javascript. How about mobile devices? All these were valid and measurable issues with my last major corporate client.
I like Adobe's Browser Labs as my first line of defense for testing. However, it's just one of many steps I take including multiple physical computers on multiple OS's connecting via multiple connections through different network proxies. You just can't test enough....and even then expect to find an error as the site is launched and matures.
Take each browser and test :D
You can use websites like browsershots.org to see how it looks on different browsers and platforms.
The most comprehensive way of doing that is to actually test in different browsers. A simple solution would be to create a virtual machine hosting server, set up multiple VMs, and then install a different browser version to different VMs to fully test your application.
Absent that, there are tools that can emulate (but not fully) browsers and you can test through those.
The best measures to adopt are:
Use a CSS Reset (read about it at the link, implement it however you like)
Use a Javascript Framework like jQuery (This will abstract a lot of cross browser quirks)
Validate your HTML and CSS. Make sure you are specifying a Doctype
You can test most browsers via Chrome, Firefox and IE8. IE8 has an IE7 mode that can be used to test for IE7. Press F12 in IE8 to get the developer window to debug and solve issues. Make sure you are prompting for all JS errors. IE6 is a tough one, but there are a number of resources available that you can probably find to help you with this.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
http://browsershots.org/
thats the site you looking for. You need to put in the url of your website, select the browsers that you want to check and click submit. It will return screenshots of the your website based on the browsers that you have selected.
There is no one way to test the app's compatibility for web browsers. First thing to keep in mind is understand the standards set for the app, define the number of browsers and versions to support. Once we know what we need to support we can keep the following points to ensure compatibility:
Test during development. Not at the end.
Avoid bleeding edge code. New functions that come with ES5 or ES6 standards would only be supported by modern browsers, hence would need polyfills in older browsers. Therefore use the most native form of Javascript wherever possible.
Use jQuery functions if it's included in the project. It helps take care of most javascript cross browser issues. If not included, use just bring its particular function in your project that you might need.
For CSS, try to use the traditional methods of layout and styling instead of the latest CSS3 one's which might not be supported by old browsers(like transform property).
Tools like Browserstack can be used to see the screenshots of how the CSS turned out on different machines.
Actually test on different machines and browsers. Although chrome provides a superb emulator but when code actually runs on that particular OS and ecosystem, then it may misbehave. So the best way to ensure is actually test them in every ecosystem.
Use Tools like VirtualBox to be able to test old browsers and different OS.
There is no way to ensure it aside from testing testing testing :-)