On Tuesday, February 3, 2004, at 03:14 PM, Ryan Christie wrote:
I think that what was more in our minds was a browser that could switch rendering engines on the fly in one window. For example, in the famous FB.7 release, if you navigate to a website that has different CSS styles available to be loaded, you can switch styles using an icon that pops up in the lower left-hand corner (for example, http://www.theward.net, or http://www.texturizer.net/firebird) ... If there was an application out there that I could use to switch from rendering engine to rendering engine, browser to browser ... I would galdly pay over US$100 for the convienience.
Wow -- a whole $100 for something that would save you endless hours of work??? Big spender!
I just can't see it being possible, unless all browser manufacturers released the source code of their rendering engine (not a chance in the case of IE). Even if they did, there would still be inconsistencies due to the fact that the rendering engines aren't operating in their intended environment.
What it seems you're asking for is a plug-in for something like Mozilla which can be set to badly render web pages with bugs (like IE's box model), emulating those rendering engines.
Again, the problem here is that you aren't testing against the browser, you're testing against the plug-in's ability to emulate that browser's rendering engine.
And it's not just the rendering engine that needs to be tested -- it's the UI (IE's lack of text sizing for px and pt fonts for example), and truckloads of underlying code modules (PNG, JavaScript, the list goes on).
The absolute best possible scenario I can think of (and even then, I have no idea if it can be done) is if you loaded everything onto a Mac running OSX, Virtual PC (for the Windows browsers), an XWindows style emulator (for Linux GUI browsers), then came up with an AppleScript for your default browser (eg Safari) which opened up a new window in all installed browsers, using the URL of your current Safari window.
You can then systematically look at all the open windows, click around a little, then close them when you're done.
EVEN THEN, it's not perfect... you're not testing the windows & linux browsers in a perfect environment (Virtual PC & XWindows are emulators, not physical machines, and are extremely slow), and there's the fact that the Multiple IE thing isn't perfect at all.
I'd never say never, but I will say 'dream on' :)
Justin French
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