Cross Browser Testing on Linux
It’s great that the web design (and development) communities have embraced and pushed standards from the W3C. Not too long ago (although it’s getting longer thank god!) a considerable amount of developers made web sites exclusive to certain browsers. During Internet Explorers heyday things didn’t change much especially with the lack of compliance and quirks with Internet Explorer 6.
As a Linux user browsing the web you probably have respect and understanding for the importance of both cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. When developing a site the first thing you should aim for is your project adhering to standards. You can never truly make your site appear and function the same for everyone (without radical measures which simply aren’t worth it) so the aim is to make your site acceptable both visually and in terms of functionality, and the best it possibly can to as wide an audience as possible.
Browser Testing
The major browsers in use are generally considered to be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome and probably in that order in terms of popularity too.
Firefox and Opera have native clients for Linux (which you should definitely download) but how can you effectively test the rest straight from your distro?
Testing Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome on Linux
Google Chrome: There isn’t a stable release of Chrome for Linux but a working development version is available which should be sufficient. Although, at the time of writing, Flash isn’t fully supported you probably aren’t flash developer as you’re using Linux anyway!
Internet Explorer: If you have Wine installed you can download the script IEs 4 Linux which will allow you to test Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6 and 7.
Safari: Safari can also be run on Wine but a better option is to test under Konqueror , Google Chrome and the Epiphany browser as they all have similar or the same rendering engine.
Font Rendering
Something to take into consideration is that fonts are rendered different on different platforms. Through personal experience I have found that Mac renders fonts slightly smaller than Linux with Windows being at the opposite end rendering them slightly bigger.
Linux Crossbrowser Testing Font Difference
As you should be using ems and not fixed font sizes (in my opinion) it shouldn’t be too much of an issue but it’s something you may have to take into consideration at one stage or another.
Font Types and Equivalents
There is no “true” web safe font list as each operating system varies in what is has pre-installed. After specifying a font it should always end with the font-family (such as Serif, Sans-Serif and Monospaced) to revert to the systems default should no font be available.
This list has fairly accurate equivalents across Linux, Mac and Windows based systems.
You can also download, install and use Microsoft fonts in Linux (Google Search). I only recommend installing them temporarily and for testing reasons to avoid laziness!
Extended Visual Testing
Browsershots is a great free online resource for seeing how your website looks under various platforms and browsers. It also takes shots in 800×600 and 1024×768 screen resolutions which is important should you be developing on a high resolution or wide screen monitor.
This reference could probably be extended and may be at some point. Hopefully that’s the basics covered and enough information to get started with.
Hi,
I am also a Linux user. I didn’t know that you could test Chrome or Safari in Linux. Will have to get those setup.
In the case of IEs for Linux, I find those to be very poor. They don’t have features like the alpha image loader. So I do IE debuging in VMWare.
I noticed that about IE too. It’s good in terms of other quirks such as positioning but a lot of the filters don’t work like the alpha filter you mentioned.
Using VMWare does kind of defeat the point as some people may not have Windows. In that case I would suggest using Browsershots, not a brilliant solution but one nonetheless. Thanks for the feedback.
Now my company use UBUNTU, it make I tried start to learn about cross browser with ubuntu.
I installed IEs 4 Linux on my OS, but IE is very slowly, how can I config it for better.
Thank
Hi Somchart. I don’t think you can do much to improve the performance. It also eats a lot of memory in the process. IEs 4 Linux uses Wine so it isn’t a native application.
As pointed out by David a lot of “features” such as filters don’t work either. However, with that being said, it should still be a good enough method purely for testing layout quirks.