Before I go any further with this post, I must confess something… I used to work on a PC all day, everyday. About three years ago, I saw the light and switched over to using a Mac, and I have never looked back. If it were up to me, I would never have to hear the Windows start up sound again, but due to my chosen profession that would be a bad move. Why, you ask? The answer lies below, and is my best attempt to explain why you need to check your websites, email blasts and other interactive work on both Mac’s and PC’s.
The original purpose of this missive was to explain why cross-browser and cross-platform testing is necessary to people who are not familiar with Internet Explorer’s lack of standards compliance. If you are a web designer/developer maybe you can use it to help explain the situation to someone who is not familiar with the issues we face. If you are not a web designer/developer and read this article, I hope it gives you a better understanding of what web standards are, and why you have to thoroughly test interactive work.
Why do we need to test websites and email blasts in different web browsers and operating systems?
The short answer to this question is it’s all Microsoft’s fault. The long answer may get a little boring and technical, but I will try to be as brief as possible and still fully explain the issue.
You may have heard web developers and designers use the terms “standards-compliant browser” or “CSS standards” and talk about the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C in short) standards that define the way web browsers are supposed to render a website. What does all of this techno-babble mean?
Think of standards this way: we all have Microsoft Excel on our computers so we can open spreadsheets. We create an Excel document, and then send it on to other people in the office and they can open it on their computer and edit and save that document. What if half the people in the office did not have Excel, but some other spreadsheet program (like Lotus 123) that does not work exactly like Excel? Would our document look the same in the other program? Would it retain all our formatting and look like it did when we created the document on our computer in Excel? Would some of the text be in different places or even jumbled up? Would the person on the other end even be able to open the document?
This is how it is with web standards. Some web browsers do not fully comply with the standards for how to interpret code as suggested by the W3C. What that means is you can create a web document and when it is viewed in a different web browser, like Internet Explorer or Firefox, or a different operating system, like Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OSX, the document’s appearance can change. What looks fine in one browser may be more or less “broken” in another. These effects can range anywhere from elements and images not lining up, to making the website difficult to navigate. It can become a mess, and possibly unusable, for a whole section of your audience.
This uncertainty from one browser to another is the reason it is necessary to be able to view your interactive work in multiple web browsers and operating system platforms. Testing will enable you to give your work a uniform appearance to the majority of people who view it online.
Now we know why, the question becomes what web browsers and operating systems should we test?
How do we know what web browsers and operating systems people who come to our websites are using? We can answer these questions through the magic of Google Analytics. We can also use the W3C’s stats that they freely provide as a gauge of what is happening out there on the internet.
Remember when I said it was all Microsoft’s fault? The reason why is that they are just now in 2009 getting around to providing a web standards-compliant version of Internet Explorer. That’s great news, right? Yes, but the problem still remains that there are two other versions of IE (6 & 7) in use in significant numbers. Worse still, all three versions interpret web documents in a different fashion. In other words, one web page can have a different appearance in each of the three versions of IE. To further complicate the issue, IE 7 and 8 can have shifts in appearance from Windows XP to Windows Vista.
For this document, I have gathered Google Analytics data from four websites that I have built to show specific stats on the use of Microsoft’s three versions of Internet Explorer and the two dominant versions of Microsoft’s operating systems that are in use today, Windows XP and Windows Vista. These are four very different types of websites that appeal to different audiences. Please note that these numbers are not absolutes for everyone, but are meant to be a guide give you an idea of just how many people are still using Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system.
As you can see from the previous chart, Internet Explorer and Windows represents a substantial part of the website-viewing world. The other two browsers that show up with any frequency in these numbers are Firefox and Safari and the other operating system is OSX. I hope this helps to explain why interactive testing in multiple browsers and platforms is necessary. I also hope that one day this type of explanation will not be necessary and all browsers will conform to the same set of rules as suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium. To quote the W3C’s website, “In order for the web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together.”
