Thought I'd ask out front. Should Opera be included? Safari? (I'd guess so)...What do you all test against? I would guess the bulk of the world would work with IE, Firefox and Chrome...

I am working on a Mac so Safari is kinda a standard now but work is always in a PC environment so I know the others need to be there. The question comes from Chaotic's Firefox vs IE downloads. I' m wondering what holes can be run into in the two browsers. Also - what is it actually being written in? I'm currently using TextMate on the Mac - any recommendations?

Hoboy wrote:Thought I'd ask out front. Should Opera be included? Safari? (I'd guess so)...What do you all test against? I would guess the bulk of the world would work with IE, Firefox and Chrome...

I am working on a Mac so Safari is kinda a standard now but work is always in a PC environment so I know the others need to be there. The question comes from Chaotic's Firefox vs IE downloads. I' m wondering what holes can be run into in the two browsers. Also - what is it actually being written in? I'm currently using TextMate on the Mac - any recommendations?

I'm not technical in the issues you raise but..
what do you mean by:
"...what holes can be run...."
and "...what is it actually being written in?"

On the PC end, I would test your scripts with IE6. Yes... Six. If it works in that, it'll work in just about any browser out there. All the newer browsers have their various features and kinks. FireFox tries to guess at things, and thus some bad coding will work in it, that won't work in other browsers. IE9 has problems with Flash at the moment, if you're going to use that for your project.

Hope that helps,

G

Graen wrote:On the PC end, I would test your scripts with IE6.

I'd have to disagree, IE has always been lenient with the javascript (or technically, ecmascript) standards, so something working in IE (be it 6 or any other version for that matter) is not a guarantee it will work in other browsers. Since testing browser compatibility is a relative minor task (just make sure you cover all the mechanics in your game, they don't have to be full playthroughs) I would recommend testing as many of the major browsers as you can, with IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera you cover 99.6% according to these stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

As for Chaotic's browser specific downloads I think they are an atrocity. These days it's easy enough to detect which browser someone is using with simple javascript and you can use that to switch out code if it is necessary.

I'll recommend to test with the greatest number of web-browser, but for a personal-development, it just impossible to do.

So i think, the easiest way is to follow the "web-norm" : if your page is valid (thank's to link like http://validator.w3.org/), it will be ok on 99 % of modern browser.

For people still using out-dated browser, have a look to alternative. It's not because XP got ie6 that you must not use something else.

For web-developer, you can use Watir (http://watir.com/) test on your project, and you can also check a web-browser with it :
http://watir.com/platforms/

To sum up (a little bit), It's depend of what you use to create your page.

If you use recent technologies (like html5 / css3), you need to check only recent web-browser.
Else, if you use more classic technologies (xhtml/ html4 / css), i think, you just have to validate against (at least) :
* IE 8 (because Xp can't have ie9 -and because ie9 is much better than the 8th)
* Firefox 3 (because more recent version won't be a problem if this one is ok)
* Safari 5 (because chrome move too fast and it use the same engine for html)
If it works fine on safari & firefox, opera & konqueror won't give you trouble.

Other web-browser mostly uses one of previous engine or they are practically never use.

About ie : ietester can be very useful, especially on XP.

Edit :
http://browsershots.org/
Here you can check the display of your page on multiple webbrowser. It's not perfect, but it's the easiest & fastest way i found to validate css/display.

Edit² :
About difference between web-browser :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... rd_HTML%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... _Sheets%29
For only "big" differences.

Browser compatibility frustrates me to no end. I've spent so much time banging my head against bugs in Firefox. And time and time and time again I've come up with something that would make my life easier only to find out that it doesn't work there.

I figure you're safe testing for IE and Firefox. Firefox is so least common denominator that if you dumb things down enough to work on it, it's likely to work everywhere. And when things don't work in Chrome or Opera, people don't seem to mind using Firefox instead. At least that's what I've seen with our games.

Then again, our games are free, so we can do pretty much whatever we want. I guess if you wanted to sell your games, you'd be more beholden to the whims of the other browsers.

Tlaero

Thanks all - I'm a beginner and want to avoid pitfalls wherever they may present themself. I'm on a Mac and use Safari primarily but back it up with Chrome and Firefox for universitality (is that a word?). Noob here and just learning the ropes...

I usually start in Firefox, because the error console (ctrl+shift+J) is just great. It shows exactly on which line in which file what error occurred. In my experience it works great with w3c standards, W3schools.com is very good for learning those. With Firefox you can make your page error free and make sure you have no misspellings.

Then I would check with internet explorer. I use virtualbox for that. Unfortunately IE seems to change its interpretation of specific commands with each version coming out, though with the latest versions this seems to be less and they tend to follow the standards more. If you test with IE, just tell people the version you tested against. Since with it's the only browser for which it is as important. For most other browsers it also so that people use the latest version. And strangely enough Microsoft's own browser is the only one for which newer versions are restricted to newer windows versions.

On Microsoft' s technet, by the way, there is excellent information on all javascript commands in IE and how they function in different versions. I would guess the next browser, which would be most widely used, will be chrome. I don't have much experience with it though. I found a good site for browser compatibility recently, which I use as a reference. Mostly anything works in Opera if it works in firefox. Then there's safari which really only is for mac-users, so I've don't know anything about that one.

Anyway, use one browser to test while you're creating and if it works perfectly there, test it in different browsers, as many as you want to, and then make sure it works in all of them. On w3schools there's a lemma on writing browser independent code. I'd advise you to read that when the time is there and it works in one browser and not in another one. Good luck in writing code and cursing all of those browsers when you just don' t get why they won't do what you want until you see the obvious.

Quick question - I assume this is all Java? In the midst of learning pretty much everything but mostly Java seems to be king for this usage...

Not java, but javascript. The term is a bit confusing, but they're 2 completely different things.

I don't know if this helps with the discussion but for what it is worth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-browser
gives a nutshell summary of early browser compatibility, discusses DOM and gives some insight into drawing javascript into the equation.

Those more technical may advise as to the correctness of the following. My understanding is that Java is allowed to run on our browers because of the "Java Virtual Machine" (which comes with the Java package). The virtual machine is the interface between the java program and your browser.

You're correct about Java, Squeeky, however, most of the stuff we do is in JavaScript, not Java. They really have nothing to do with each other. When JavaScript came out, Java was really popular. So the creators of JavaScript tried to freeload on that popularity by calling their scripting language "JavaScript."

Tlaero