Multi-Safari
October 8th, 2007 by Thomas Fuchs, 2 comments »Finally, there is a way to quickly check on Safari compatibility for multiple versions of Safari, all on the same machine. Oh, note that something alike that for IE has been available for quite a while now, and Firefox is nicely self-contained.
The availability of multiple versions of the same web browser in parallel should really be something browser developers should support out of the box. Given that third-party installers can manage that, can’t it be so hard to add that ability? Please think of your fellow developers’ sanity. 
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: get the most out of the libraries, fast!
The only way to truly run IE6 and IE7 side-by-side is to use virtual machines. The reason is that IE is broken up into several DLLs. Thus, if you install IE7, then try to run IE6, IE6 will be using some DLL’s (such as the JS engine) from IE7. This results in a freakish mongrel (yes, freakier than a clean IE, and not nearly as cool as Mongrel, Zed Shaw’s http server) that is neither IE6 nor IE7, and not something you will see in the wild.
Just to let people know, I’ve used multiple IEs for some time now to test for IE6 compatibility mainly with CSS (I trust Prototype and Scriptaculous have been tested) and the IE6 provided in the package has a few differences to ‘real’ IE6 (luckily I also have a computer with IE6 natively still):
- IE’s web developer toolbar thingy only works in IE7 for me, and my multiple IE6 won’t let it work, not a major problem but being as it’s the thing I use to figure out what’s gone wrong it’s a little annoying – this is probably due to the fact that it’s kept self-contained from the system’s ‘normal’ IE (IE7 in my case)
- more importantly, it doesn’t render in quite the same way. A page can look fine in my multiple IE6 but broken in real IE6, and vice-versa. While it’s generally good at what it does, it’s not perfect, so by all means use it for development, but do a final test on a real IE6 if you want compatibility. This could possibly be due to different minor versions of IE6, I don’t know, but just beware.
Other than those two, I find the multiple IEs program really useful. I’ll be sure to check out multi-Safari, although it’s bad enough getting my employers to realise that quite a lot of people use Firefox and that we should make sure everything works there, let alone Safari or Opera!