If you're like 90% of web users, then you use Internet Explorer,
Microsoft's web browser. Why? Well, because it comes with
Windows, usually, and it's there on your desktop when you first
want to use the web. When you're creating a website, however,
you have to consider the other 10% of the web's users - the ones
who use alternative web browsers. If you don't test your site in
each one of these browsers, you might be in for a nasty surprise
when a large part of the web can't use it. Here's a guide to the
most common alternative web browsers.
Mozilla
While Mozilla is a web browser itself, it is also an engine
(Gecko) that powers a lot of other web browsers. The Gecko code
is free and open-source, created by Netscape, and is currently
Internet Explorer's biggest competitor. It works on Windows,
Mac, Linux, and almost everything else out there.
The advantage of Gecko is that if you've tested with one of the
Mozilla browsers, your site should work on all of them. The
Mozilla browsers include Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Camino,
Kmeleon, and lots of browsers for the Linux operating system.
You'll probably find it easiest to download Mozilla Firefox from
getfirefox.com and test your website using that.
Opera
Opera is, in many ways, the alternative alternative browser, for
people who are too odd to even want to use a Mozilla browser.
It's very much a niche product, developed by a small Norwegian
company, and many more technical users like it because of its
constant innovation when it comes to features - anything you
like in another web browser was probably available in Opera
first. Opera is for Windows, Mac and Linux.
You can download a free version of Opera from opera.com. It has
ads, but it's perfectly fine for testing. If you like Opera
enough to actually use it for your own web browsing, you can pay
a one-time fee of around $40 to remove the ads.
Safari
Safari is now the official Mac web browser, which means that
it's important to test on it if you want Macintosh users to be
able to see your website. Unfortunately, Safari doesn't run at
all on Windows.
However, Safari uses the same engine as a browser called
Konqueror, which can run on PCs on the Linux operating system.
Linux is free, and you can easily download it, burn it to CD,
and run it straight from the CD. Knoppix (
www.knoppix.com) is a
popular and easy to use kind of Linux for this purpose.
Alternatively, if you don't want to mess around with a whole
other operating system, you could try a service like BrowserCam
(
www.browsercam.com). They will load your website into many
different browsers, and then send you pictures of it to let you
see if there are any problems that need to be fixed. Because of
the bandwidth and the number of computers that have to be
involved, though, most of these services aren't free.
Lynx
Lynx works on a lot of very esoteric operating systems, but
works fine on Windows too. It's a text-only browser, and it pays
no attention to layout or graphics. You can download Lynx at
lynx.browser.org.
Why would anyone want that, you wonder? Well, Lynx is mostly
popular among blind people who use screen-readers to turn web
pages into speech. How well your web page works in Lynx is often
considered is often considered to be a test of how accessible it
is to anyone with disabilities, as well as to anyone who turns
off things like Javascript in their browser settings.
The very worst sites will come back with a message telling users
to download a supported browser when they're visited in Lynx -
never do this. You should be aiming to make sure that Lynx users
can see a basic, text-only version of your site, with
easy-to-use navigation. If your site doesn't support this, then
it's probably breaking all sorts of disability discrimination
laws, and you should fix it as soon as you can.
For more information, you might like to visit the Viewable with
Any Browser Campaign at
www.anybrowser.org/campaign.
About the author:
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
