Even worse, many Mac-based designers don??™t test on a Windows
PC or in Internet Explorer, which has the bulk of the market. If you??™re a Windows user, grab
a cheap Mac that??™s capable of running Mac OS X (such as a second-hand iBook or a Mac
mini), and if you??™re a Mac user, either grab a cheap Windows PC to test with or run
Windows as a virtual machine (via Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion) on an Intel Mac or
using Virtual PC if you have a PPC-based machine. (You can also use Boot Camp on an Intel
Mac, but that requires booting back and forth between Windows and Mac OS X, so using
a virtual environment is more efficient unless you have two computers.) Linux users also
have a range of browsers to test on. Firefox is popular on that platform, and Safari is a
rough analog for Konqueror. It is worth noting, however, that the default fonts with Linux
vary considerably from those that you??™d expect on a Mac or Windows PC??”so you should
always define fallback fonts accordingly, and test in Linux if possible. See Chapter 3 for
more on font stacks.
Installing multiple versions of browsers
One of the big problems when it comes to web design testing is that some browser manufacturers
don??™t enable you to run multiple versions of their products. The two biggest
culprits here are, unsurprisingly, Microsoft and Apple, who presumably argue that as their
browsers rely on system-level code, they can??™t provide standalone testing environments
for older releases.
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