Twitter for Website Designers: Test Cross-Browser Compatibility

As Safari and Chrome continue to rise in popularity and gain larger shares of the browser market, it becomes more popular for website designers to test their designs and layouts on these two browsers as well as the big two: Firefox and Internet Explorer.

But IE is not just one browser: some people are still on IE5, even more stick to IE6, IE7 is growing and now IE8 is out. To have all these browsers, or software to emulate them, begins to swallow up more and more hard-disk space every month.

I design my own websites, and I know the quandary. However, I have not downloaded Chrome, because I assumed, like Netscape (and Safari I think) it operated on the same engine as Firefox, and so if my site looked OK in Firefox it would look Okay in Chrome.

Wrong!! I just realised that one of my elements was slightly out of place in the Google cache of my site, while I have noticed this before it suddenly occurred to me that the Google cache may have been taken with its Chrome browser, or certainly with its rendering engine in play.

But rather than download Chrome, I thought I would ask on Twitter if any of my friends (followers to me are friends that I haven't met) were using the Chrome browser, and could check if my site looked OK.

Several people responded within minutes of my Tweet. Most to inform me that the element that is out of place on the Google cache is out of place in the Chrome browser. I will now need to fix that, and one of the people who responded to me has agreed to assist me in this effort. So I do not need to download the Chrome browser.

I love Twitter, and I love it even more each time I come up with a new use for it that is beneficial to me. You know I always share so it may benefit everyone.