6. Everything??”all over again: When any major changes are made, you need to go back
through your browsers and make sure the changes haven??™t screwed anything up.
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There are other browsers out there, but the preceding list will deal with the vast majority
of your users. However, always try to find out the potential audience for a website to
ascertain whether you should place more focus on a particular browser. For example, if
authoring a site for a mostly Mac-based audience, it might make sense to use Safari as the
basis for testing, and perhaps even wheel out the long-canceled Internet Explorer 5 for
Mac, just to make sure your site works in it.
At each stage of testing, I recommend that you save HTML and CSS milestones on a very
regular basis. If something fails in a browser, create a copy of your files and work on a fix.
Don??™t continually overwrite files, because it??™s sometimes useful??”and, indeed, necessary??”
to go back to previous versions.
Whichever browsers you test in, it??™s important to not avoid the ???other side.??? Windows
users have long seen the Mac as being inconsequential, but at the time of writing Safari
now counts for about 4% of all web users, and the trend for Mac sales (as a percentage of
the market) is upward. Usefully, there??™s now a version of Safari for Windows, but even the
Mac and Windows versions of Firefox show slight differences in the way sites are handled
(mostly regarding text).
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