Safari and Opera

[Abby]

I have FireFox and IE8, but I don't want to install a whole ton of browsers just to test my one website-in-progress.I've been using this IE net renderer site to test it in other versions of IE. But I can't find anything similar for Safari and Opera. How do the more experienced web developers address this problem?Thanks.

[lastlifelost]

I keep current versions of the big browsers installed on my system (or on a portable drive to save space) for testing. If you're really not into installing all of them, you can try rendering sites like http://browsershots.org/, though I've had dubious luck with them. I'd love to see what other people suggest, though!

[boen_robot]

Sites like browsershots.org are good for testing the look of your site, but not its behaviour. The majority of issues that you encounter in the browser are CSS and JavaScript ones. browsershots only deals with the CSS ones.What's the problem about installing Safari, Chome and Opera? They're small in size, and you don't have to place shortcuts on your desktop. They can be there, ready, only to be used when the Firefox version seems fine.(While Safari and Crhome both use WebKit for CSS rendering, they use two different JavaScript engines, so if you use any JavaScript, it's worth having them both for testing)

[Abby]

Would Safari for Windows accurately reflect what a Mac user experiences?Thanks for the advice so far.

[boen_robot]

AFAIK, the only difference is in font rendering, and in font smoothing to be more precise. But that's may only affect you if you're using relative font units (anything other than pixels), and even then, the interference is minimal. Considering that different browsers on Windows have different ways of dealing with font smoothing, you can safely assume that if your site works fine in all Windows browsers, it will at least look fine on MAC safari, as well as Linux browsers.(JavaScript on MAC is also guaranteed, but the same can't be said about Linux browsers; most do fine for most scenarios, so it will be rare if you have problems, and they have a small share anyway)