Internet-Explorer

Top 5 Reasons To Test Your Website Across Browsers

I would hope that those of you taking the time to read this posting would have some idea of why you should perform some level of testing of the software and websites you create. However, I am keenly aware that some management types don’t always understand the importance of testing until an untested “feature” appears in the wild, frustrating all that run across it.

1. Ensure Cross Browser Compatibility- Unless you develop a website for internal usage only, where you are able to successfully restrict users to a specific version of a specific browser, Cross Browser Compatibility ensures your site functions well for the greatest number of users.
2. Detect Shallow Errors - Simply loading a website for a quick look in all the major browsers allows you to find 95% of all the browser compatibility errors for your site.
3. Discover Performance Issues - Typically, older and less-advanced browsers, such as Internet Exporer, and the older versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are unable to process the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML that the most recent and more-advanced versions of these browsers handle with ease.
4. Prioritize Backwards Compatibility - I have heard countless times that we need to make sure this website supports browser versions that were released more than a decade ago. Instead of just making excuses for why you can’t support them, testing your site in the older browsers first allows you to put a more accurate time estimate that supporting these browsers will require. Its amazing to see how the requirements for supporting old and outdated browsers evaporate as the time and cost estimates begin to add up.
5. CYA - Whether it is your internal customer that is requesting the new website or you are an agency working with another individual or business for a new website, the last thing you want to have happen is that the customer open the site when it goes live in a browser you have not tested yet and has major issues. Establish ahead of time what the list of supported browsers will be and make sure to test all of them. If you have time, test the next most popular browsers or versions of popular browsers.

While testing your website may not be the most exciting part of web development, it definitely will save you time and money in the long run.

When Is Enough CSS Enough?

One of the major pushes in web development today is to try to do as much of the styling of a website as is possible from within the CSS of the site. The idea behind this is that when you do so, you remove styling responsibilities from your JavaScript and HTML content, resulting in a much better separation of concerns. The other aspect of this is that CSS styling is typically handled in a more native fashion in the browser as compared to what you can accomplish via Javascript.

Web Browser Font Rendering is the New Edge Case

In the early days of the web, designers and developers relied upon visitors to the sites they were developing to have their chosen font pre-installed on their computers so that their web browser of choice would be able to properly render the selected font. As quickly became obvious, there is a wide variety of fonts installed across all computers worldwide, so this was not an achievable scenario, especially when print level typography was desired. Unfortunately, at that time, the solution was to put all of the text in an image, ensuring the text would display exactly as the designer had specified, but hiding the same text from search engines and blind users.

Parallax Background Scrolling on Internet Explorer is Not Smooth

One of the pleasures of working on a website that is using some of the latest technologies is that you often run into strange compatability issues that only affect one browser or another, and many of the forums have little to no information about how to properly address the issues. Parallax scrolling is a technique that has been around for a while now, highlighted by Apple’s own iPhone 5s card-esque scrolling on their homepage, among others. While the site I am working on does not have as elaborate a parallax implementation, it does not work instantly across browsers by default either.

IE 10 Text Box Clear Button Covers Text

When working on a project that required quantities to be entered into a text box and displayed aligned to the right of the text box, I ran across a peculiar issue. If the text box had focus, a new button appeared in the text box that would allow the user to completely clear the contents of the text box. When focus moved to another element on the page, the clear button disappeared, but part of the right side of the text that was previously displayed in the text box disappeared as well. If you were to inspect that element’s value via JavaScript, you would discover that the data was still intact, and that only its display was affected.

Window.Open Causes Browser Compatibilty Issues

One of the things that always annoys me as a web developer is when native browser functions that are accesible from JavaScript do not share the same function signature. One perfect example of this is the window.open function. When you are using non-Microsoft browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, you are able to make a call something like this window.open(url, 'window name', 'dimensions or other settings');. The window name parameter is important because it allows you to open multiple links in the same external window/tab. However, when using Internet Explorer, especially Internet Explorer 8 and older, you can only use window.open(url);. If you try to use the first type of function call, you get a very ambiguous error message in the browser that doesn’t tend to show exactly where the error occurred.

Google Analytics Site Speed is a bit Unreliable

Google Analytics will now allow site owners to track the performance of their websites with real live traffic. This is a nice feature that lets you understand just how long it takes for the average visitor to your site to see the fully complete version of your website. While this sounds like a great tool that will give you an accurate view of yoru website’s performance, it does not tell the full story. You can access the Site Speed section of Google Analyics under the Behavior>Site Speed>Overview section. Please be aware that not all visitors will send this information, so you will have to have a certain amount of traffic to your site before you will get any information in this section at all.

Mobile Web Development Is the New Internet Explorer 6

Developing a website that works well across devices and browsers is an excersize in playing Whack-A-Mole. Once you get one browser working on a desktop browser, you go to the next browser and find that not everything works the same way. In 2014, it seems that there aren’t that many differences in functionality between desktop browsers, but that all changes once you start making a responsive website that must handle mobile devices as well as it does desktop browsers.

Can Legacy Internet Explorer Go Away Already?

For years, Internet Explorer was a four-letter word around web developers. Recently, Microsoft has stepped up their game when it comes to their web browser. I almost have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming when I type this, but Internet Explorer 10 and 11 are decent and modern web browsers that many websites don’t have to do anything special to support.

However, Internet Explorer 9 and before are another story. The latest compatibility problemn I ran across would be one that is quite confusing to a web developer that has not been around those that have dealt with it before. The symptoms are that CSS rules that you can verify are in your CSS file are not being applied in Internet Explorer, but are applied in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.

jQuery.hover Issues in Internet Explorer on Windows 7

When creating a new mega-dropdown menu for a site I was working on, I used jQuery’s .hover event to trigger which content the menu was displayed. This seemed to work as expected in most browsers that I tested in, except for one, Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t even in every instance of Internet Explorer.

Windows 7

After Windows Vista came out as one of the biggest duds that the world has ever seen, Windows 7 was a ringing success. Windows 7 is an extremely functional and useful Operating System in the vein of Windows XP, but during testing of this website, we found one troubling issue with every version of Internet Explorer we installed on it. When you hovered over the menu and triggered the jQuery.hover() event, Internet Explorer seemingly locked-up for a few seconds, making the entire browser unresponsive. In a stroke of strange luck, I was unable to reproduce this functionality in Internet Explorer on Windows 8 or 8.1, so this is something that only affects the older operating systems. The fix is to replace jQuery.hover() with jQuery(document).on(“mouseenter”) and call the appropriate function as well.