Anna Ullrich : SuperPreview

“Sadistic” Web Developers Taunt Internet Explorer 6 Users

Anna — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:59:28 GMT

There’s a good article on CNN.com today titled “Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6”, about web developers going on the offense to get users of IE 6 to upgrade their browser. I was hoping to see Expression Web MVP Morten Rand-Hendricksen’s own website Stop Living In The Past mentioned in the article, but the article only mentions http://www.ie6nomore.com/ and http://www.bringdownie6.com/, although there are many more sites out there devoted to squashing IE6.

Web developers are naturally motivated to kill IE 6 primarily because it would make their jobs much easier. At the same time, the phrase “job security” always comes to mind when I hear web developers complain about this or that browser quirk they have to troubleshoot in order to perfect their client’s website. If getting a website to look consistently across multiple browsers was as easy as web developers wish, the job market for developers might shrivel up! ;)

Out of curiosity I opened that CNN article in SuperPreview, comparing the page as it appears in FireFox 3 with the page as it appears in IE 6, to see how well the CNN web developers did in accounting for IE 6 readers. Pretty darn good. The content is all readable, that’s most important, but there are big shifts in the layout; guess it’s time to get back to work CNN web developers!

In case you’re wondering, the title of this post is inspired by a quote in that CNN article from a post by Mark Trammel of Digg, which reads “Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.” True, true …

Test your sites in different versions of Internet Explorer (Part 2) – Introducing SuperPreview (BETA)

Anna — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:40:00 GMT

My earlier post Test your websites in different versions of Internet Explorer has received a lot of hits since posted it and so I'm really pleased to submit this follow-up post on a new feature developed by my Expression Web team called SuperPreview that helps with the same problem.

Rather than repeat what others have already written about so far, I'll just post links to their reviews and our articles on SuperPreview:

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/19/microsoft-superpreview-website-tester/

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/microsoft-announces-superpreview-for-ie-browser-testing/

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090318/expression-web-superpreview-cross-browser-testing/

http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2009/03/18/superpreview-technology.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2009/03/18/Microsoft-Expression-Web-SuperPreview-for-Windows-Internet-Explorer.aspx

http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565874.aspx

http://www.designisphilosophy.com/microsoft-expression-web/introducing-expression-web-superpreview-cross-browser-testing-at-your-fingertips-20090318/

Video interview with Erik Saltwell from the Microsoft Expression Web team:

http://visitmix.com/News/Expression-Web-SuperPreview

Download the free public BETA version of SuperPreview here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/6/8/568F0D28-0434-4794-B7FC-FB293BCC98FB/SuperPreview_Trial_en.exe

Test your websites in different versions of Internet Explorer

Anna — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:33:00 GMT

[Update March 18, 2009 - see my new post about a new feature called SuperPreview for testing your website in multiple versions of IE: http://blogs.msdn.com/anna/archive/2009/03/18/test-your-sites-in-different-versions-of-internet-explorer-part-2-introducing-superpreview-beta.aspx . Now back to the original post ....]

Many web developers that I know rely on multiple physical machines or virtual environments to test their websites in different versions of Internet Explorer. Seems to be one of the most time consuming tasks that a web developer does…not just tweaking their markup to ensure cross-browser compatibility, but also the manual process of pulling up each page of their website in different browsers, browser versions, and on different platforms to boot.

Some alternatives exist for testing your website in different versions of Internet Explorer, including:

IE Netrenderer - http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/
I just discovered this one today while reading some threads on the tcwebpros.org discussion alias, and am surprised I haven’t heard of it before. It has one of the easiest to use interfaces and fastest results for this type of online screenshot service. Just go to their website, insert the URL you want to test, select the version of Internet Explorer that you want to test in, and click Render. Here’s a screenshot of their website showing the Microsoft Expression homepage as it appears on Internet Explorer 6 – wow, the site looks perfect!
r
IETester - http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
I found out about this application from Chris Coyier who apparently develops on a Mac and uses IE Tester to check the appearance of his sites on different versions of Internet Explorer. Seems reliable but I can’t help but wonder about the fidelity of it compared to viewing a page in the browser itself.
And last, and yes least, on my list is Browsershots http://browsershots.org/
I say “least” because the process is just too slow and that gets frustrating, especially when you wait and wait and the screenshot has failed or something.