Comments on: Developing for Multiple Browsers

By: Ravi Santlani

Ravi Santlani — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:39:07 +0000

Ravi Santlani : Hi, My Website is a Product that involves download of component and then use it & do most of work with it in javascript. I hav to make it work in atleast 2 of browsers: IE6/7 and Firefox. Can anyone tel me how can i know by any notes or resourse, wheather particular statement will work in both or not. I use Microsoft VS2005 for development & aptana editor for checking if particular tag/attribute is compatible with which browser. Please help me asap in this matter. Please mail me necessary at ravibullish@gmail.com

— Regards, Ravi Santlani ravibullish@gmail.com

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 06:19:57 +0000

okie dokie

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Mon, 29 May 2006 08:43:34 +0000

@Kyle, that's typically the attitude of someone who doesn't have much experience in writing JavaScript. Indeed you can make web sites just as accessible with or without JavaScript. But just out of curiosity...

Personally I always try and avoid JavaScript as much as possible.

Why?

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Mon, 29 May 2006 08:39:50 +0000

Ryan, it’s interesting how you mentioned in your comment about the deadline being tight, and having a degradable version would have heavily added more cost to the project. Tis very true. There are many times that Interaction Designers don’t even think about fallbacks and sometimes I wish they did. Then beyond that from a business perspective, developing a fallback application is just wasting money (or at least that’s the conclusion). I could only imagine the kind of fallbacks that would need to take place for something that includes a lot of drag and drop, sorting through menu trees, inline editing, etc, etc. It really does double the scope of the time allotted to get this stuff done. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way and has had to make that decision to just go forth with the main plans of getting things right in one browser and at least shipping that… then being a bit late with the rest of the stuff.

By: Kyle Erhart

Kyle Erhart — Sun, 21 May 2006 23:17:30 +0000

Personally I always try and avoid Javascript as much as possible. I use it occasionally but for the most part I stay away from it.

As for browsers, I always design for Firefox until I've got the page perfect in there, then I perfect it in IE (always always always). Then comes Opera.

By: Adriand

Adriand — Sun, 21 May 2006 10:27:43 +0000

As a mac user, I tend to leave IE fixes to last too, as dangerous as that may be. I think the key point you made was knowing that it's possible to do what you want to do in IE. If you don't know if it will work -- make a quick prototype of the concept and test it across your target browsers.

As you also mention, developing in fewer browsers allows you to be more flexible to change, since you haven't already invested time in making existing code cross-browser compatible.

I still feel that having the project broken in IE adds to the stress in the back of your mind though. The time it takes to fix things for IE can be a great unknown.

By: Ryan Campbell

Ryan Campbell — Sat, 20 May 2006 03:54:42 +0000

The first wireframe always works in all browsers, but as code changes and tweaks need to be made to the layout, things get a little out of hand. Ideally, we would do it all right all the time, but the joy of programming comes from seeing things work, which leads to us getting ahead of ourselves sometimes.

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Fri, 19 May 2006 22:29:57 +0000

For your CSS errors, were you using perfectly valid CSS all along? That will shorten your development cycle. (It will be much more dramatically shortened with valid HTML at all times.)

By: Ryan Campbell

Ryan Campbell — Wed, 17 May 2006 14:38:27 +0000

hemebond, JavaScript is required for it. Making a degradable version would have doubled to development time, and when you are starting a company you are on a limited budget with limited time and resources. Who knows, maybe one day we will have a degradable version though. For now, we’re happy making the user experience great for 90+ % of users, and we can fine tune for the rest as time goes on.

By: hemebond

hemebond — Wed, 17 May 2006 09:29:21 +0000

So, when I stumble across this website, using Firefox, Javascript disabled, am I going to see anything? Will it work at all?

Or have you built another http://shopping.live.com ?