I'm keen to hear some opinions and get some good resources on this to hopefully get an idea of how far I need to take our testing strategy.
Miles,
I think having multiple Win OS versions floating around just for testing is out of reach of most freelancers, and in most cases, not needed.
Personally, I test IE4-6 on a single XP machine which has been "hacked" so they can all run at once. Whilst I'm not confident this is a perfect solution, the reality is that this is as far as I'm prepared to go :)
I also have a few misc. versions of Mozilla, Fire(bird|fox), Opera, etc on that machine.
My main machine is OS X, so the various OS X browsers get a good work out during development. I do however test an old version of IE5.2 under Mac OS 9 (Classic under OSX), but this is primarily so I can test 5.2 (classic) AND 5.3 (OSX) side-by-side -- it's not because I think rendering engine changed much across the two OS versions.
The thing is, the longer spend on this stuff, the more I remember and automatically avoid the problems in each browser, so I'm spending a LOT less time testing than I used to.
You cannot test for everyone (it's far too expensive for the average project), so I just aim for an even spread of realistic options, and hope that this (combined with feedback from users) can fill in the blanks.
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
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