Internet Browser Wars and the Importance of Cross-Platform Testing

Originally published on the EGC Group Blog on February 28, 2013. You can read the full article there. This is an excerpt of that article.

Since the beginning of browser based internet, different browsers have caused web developers a lot of headaches.

In the late 1990s, when the big browsers were still Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, NetMechanic.com illustrated just that difference between the two early powerhouses. Back then, there were even differences in what HTML tags were supported, such as <blink> for Netscape and <marquee> for Internet Explorer.

While Netscape and a few other old browsers have now fallen by the wayside in favor of Firefox and Chrome, browser differences are still the bane of a developer’s existence. A designer, for instance, can create an amazing template in Photoshop on their Mac, send it over to the developer (who is often using a PC), who will then create the HTML mock-up, test it in whatever browsers they have downloaded, and then send back the test link. The designer will look at it in a different browser version on a different operating system, and say that it’s all wrong.

Read the full article on the EGC Group Blog.