The Challenge
Making your web pages look and behave the same no matter the browser or the operating system your visitor is using, can be a challenge even for the most skilled web developers. With over twenty web browsers on the market and four major Operating Systems (Windows, Linux distributions, Mac and Solaris) the number of combinations browsers-OS is pretty high. But in the beginning there was only one browser, the Netscape navigator (wasn’t that nice?), followed in a couple of years by Internet Explorer.
A Little History
The first browsers war took place in the late ‘90s when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer were competing for Internet browsers market share. Unfortunately, the competition lead to implementation of proprietary features (instead of complying with the standards) and rushed releases (full of bugs), so in the “dark ages” of the first browsers wars crashes, security issues and partial web standards compliance were frequent issues faced by the web developers. Navigator started as incontestable leader (when IE 4.0 was released Netscape had 72% market share compared to Microsoft’s 18%) but the financial power of Microsoft and the fact that IE came bundled with Windows, tipped the balance towards Internet Explorer.
By the end of 2002, Netscape was down to less than 8% of market share. 
Other browsers like Opera, Safari, Konqueror were still struggling around the 1% value for market share value. The Mozilla project launched by Netscape in 1998, finally broke Internet Explorer monopoly with the release of Mozilla Firefox in 2004. The Firefox release marked the beginning of the second browsers war and since its release in 2004 Mozilla’s browser established a growing niche in the browsers market, ending up with 36.3% market share in December 2007.
Testing Browsers Compatibility
So, with browsers not fully implementing the web standards, web developers are aware of the fact that some combinations of code might result in different displays over different browsers. The solution is to tweak the code so it behaves the same way, no matter the browser-OS combination used.
Here’s a nice tool that “makes” screenshots of your web page in different browsers and different operating systems. It is a free open-source online service that employs a number of distributed computers, each running specific operating systems along with specific browsers. Your request is sent to the computers, they take a screenshot and they upload the pictures to the central server where you can download and check them out.
- Test your web design in different browsers -
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