Firebug in IE

By Sean Sanders on October 20, 2009 at 6:50 am in Development, Technical, css, html

firebug-logoI’m Sean Sanders, one of the relatively new programmers here at T&S. Our former programmer Nick Little blogged previously about tools to help with web development, and one of those tools I find incredibly useful is the Firebug plugin for Firefox. There are some situations when having the ability to look at the CSS in other browsers the way you can in Firefox is helpful.  This is especially true with IE. Because of the way IE chooses to (not) display CSS rules, we often have to create style sheets just for IE to make it display our sites properly. A few days ago I found myself in a situation where I was trying to debug a site in IE7 and wanted to figure out exactly which rules were being applied. I looked into seeing if there was a way to use Firebug in IE.

What I found was a short bit of Javascript the people behind Firebug had written to be able use some of Firebug’s functionality in other browsers. They call it Firebug Lite.  This isn’t the full addon for Firefox, so you can’t change CSS on the fly the way you can in Firefox, but it’s still useful for being able to see how the rules you’ve created are getting applied. The following is the script for adding it to your website:

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js”></script>

Also, for ease of use I wrote a bit of PHP to quickly turn the Firebug Lite script on and off.

<? if ($_GET['firebug']=="1") { ?>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js"></script>
<? } ?>

Now all you have to do is view the webpage normally when you don’t want to see the Firebug information, and add the parameter ?firebug=1 to the end of the url if you want to turn on Firebug. (Or, if there are already URL parameters, &firebug=1) I mentioned IE earlier, but if you are having trouble with your website in other browsers, such as Safari or Opera, it works equally well.

The case for checking on older browsers

By Tim Priebe on September 5, 2008 at 6:30 am in Design

As I’ve mentioned before, we check our websites in six different browser / operating system combinations. Just the other day, my programmer asked me if we could stop checking in one of Opera. For Internet Explorer 6.0, there’s even an IE Death March website dedicated to telling others they should stop checking their websites in that browser.

To make things even more confusing, Wikipedia’s page of browser comparisons lists a whopping thirty-five current web browsers. Which ones should you check your website on?

Although we do take into account usage, as I mentioned before, we also take into account how easy it is to code for that browser. It’s a balance between the two. There are currently seven different programs on the browser usage list at w3schools.com. We check five of those seven. I’m going to talk about a three that are outliers in either usage, ease of coding, or both.

Internet Explorer 6.0

IE6 is a pain to code for. Thus the previously mentioned IE Death March website. However, it still has a significant market share, somewhere around 25% of the web surfers out there. Although it frequently frustrates our programmer (and many other programmers around the world), we continue to make sure our websites work in IE6, because we don’t want 1/4 of the website’s visitors to get less than the full intended effect of the website.

Internet Explorer 5.0

If you can imagine that IE6 is hard to code for, just imagine how much harder IE5 is. Combine that with the fact that it has less than a 0.5% market share makes it obvious why we don’t bother checking our sites in IE5.

Opera

Opera has a relatively small market share at 1.9%. However, it is fairly “standards compliant.” Simply, this means that once you code for other browsers that comply well with the web standards, (Firefox and Safari in our case), 99% of the time the website works correctly in Opera as well. So the low cost in terms of time means that we still check in Opera, despite its low market share.

Hopefully this gives you some indication why we check in the browsers we check in.

Check your website on other browsers

By Tim Priebe on July 9, 2008 at 6:30 am in Design, General, Mac, Technical, Windows

If you’re only checking your website in the web browser you use, others may not be seeing the site how you intend them to. After all, chances are pretty low that everyone looking at your site is using the same browser you are.

Here at T&S Web Design, we test on several browsers on Macs and several on Windows. Here’s the breakdown, along with the percentage of usage from w3schools.com, taken June 2008. Obviously the percentages will not be exactly the same on your site, but they shouldn’t be too far off. (Note that Firefox, Safari and Opera have the same percentage on both Mac and Windows, because w3schools.com does not differentiate between operating systems)

Of course, the best way to check in both Windows and Mac’s OSX is to have a Mac and a Windows computer. Barring that, another viable solution is Browsershots.org. There are tons of browsers available across four different operating systems. Note that they have Opera on Windows, not Mac, but it shouldn’t make a difference.