If you are just setting up as a developer or need to know what testing suite to set up in your office before you send your client their completed web site.

Here’s the definite list for bulletproof browser testing suite:

Cloud services

• Online: Browsershots – Cost – free – all browsers current and past versions.

Local installs on a Mac

• Mac OS X: Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Camino
• Mac OS X using Parallels with installs of Linux, Win XP and Win Vista operating systems:
  • Windows XP: Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8 – using IE tester.
  • Windows 7: Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8 – using IE tester.
  • Windows Vista: (if required)
  • Linux: Seamonkey, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari

As part of your quality assurance you should include which browsers and operating systems you are testing on in your client contract. Any backward compatible coding for IE6 or below should be added at extra cost if required.

With existing sites, if you look at Google analytics data, you will be able to see the share of users using each browser and make the best judgement from there, in terms of which old browsers to support.

If the results of your CSS designs are inspirational, don’t let speed slow down people seeing your work!

If you notice your style sheets are getting bloated, it may be time to stop and give it the code a good make over. With the following steps and your style sheet will be in shape in no time. Fortunately, there are some great online tools out there for cleaning and optimising  your CSS for you.

Web page analyser:

• Web page analyser – Find out how long your external CSS, JS files take to load

Find redundant CSS code:

• dustmeselectors – Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension (for v1.5 or later) that finds unused CSS selectors.

Learn CSS shorthand:

• CSS shorthand cheatsheet

Optimise, clean up CSS:

• CleanCSS
• Tabifier Works for both HTML and CSS

Wordpress plugins:

• CSS compress

Learn more about CSS management at 456Berea Street.