How to view your site in different browsers?

[sijpie]

As we are all supposed to check our designs in a variety of browsers, to ensure our visitors will see what we want them to see, is there an easy way to do that, other than load umpteen browsers on the PC?

If I use iframes, and have a <noframes> section, should I worry what my page looks like? Is there anybody still surfing (other than the robots) in a non-frame compatible browser? Well some PDA browsers don't support frames, any others? So if I do need to worry about what the page looks like in a non frame supporting browser, what is the easiest way to check that?

[Narasinha]

I have Internet Explorer, Opera, and Mozilla Firebird installed on my PC. I use Opera as my primary browser and the other two generally just for testing. Installing at least a couple other browsers is usually a good idea. It can be frustrating to know that someone reported something in your site is wrong in a browser on a platform (i.e. Mac or Unix) that you don't have. Luckily, there are a lot of people here on the WPW forums who will be glad to help with such things by viewing pages and reporting their findings.

As far as using the IFRAME tag goes, there are several browsers that either don't support frames at all, or don't specifically support the IFRAME. Netscape 4 (as far as I know) does not support the IFRAME tag. A number of large corporations and government agencies only allow Netscape 4 to be used on their systems (for some bizarre reason). Thankfully, that number is constantly dwindling. Several people here have Netscape 4 installed just for testing purposes.

As you mentioned, PDAs and cellular phone browsers do not support frames. Opera 7 has a nice feature that will allow you to view a page as such a device might see it. The feature is called SSR (Small Screen Rendering) and is toggled (in Windows OS) by pressing shift+f11. A version of Opera is used as the default browser in several cell phones and PDAs, so the SSR view can be quite accurate.

Writing solid standards-compliant HTML is probably the best step you can take to ensure that your pages are functional in the largest number of different browsers and platforms. the IFRAME tag is valid in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional and Frameset pages, but the tag has been dropped in XHTML 1.1.

[jratclif]

On my web site, I have forms to be filled out and submitted to an email rather than to a database. What I have noticed is that for people using AOL, the email comes in blank. People using other email programs, no problem.
Is there a way to set up the forms so that people on AOL can submit and not loose the information they have typed in?
I would prefer to send to a database, but currently the site is on Earthlink and they don't support it.
JR

[mikmik]

There is a good looking section about frames on this site (I just found) http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/abdesign2.html#color

It looks like a great resource overall!

[Webnauts]

Why don't check this? http://www.dejavu.org/emulator.htm

[sijpie]

Those Deja-vu emulators are quite good. A shame that internal links are not working. But it definitly gives a flavour!

[Webnauts]

What about this shareware? http://www.softlookup.com/preview/dis22391.html