Compatibility Issues

“Lecture notes of today’s class will be available on your e-mail account, please check it out” said Prof. Wong. “Check your (Univ) e-mail” was one of my most sincerely loathed words. Interacting with my mailbox was one of those ‘urghhhh’ experiences. Well yeah as a child I did enjoy solving jigsaw puzzles and that was because at the end it’d form a Tintin or a Tyrannosaurus. But with my mailbox I’d get into an abysmal labyrinth. The screen shot below should help me explain this better. The routine sign-in would take me here.

Screenshot of my mailbox as viewed in IE

- I never could figure how to ‘select’ mails to delete/move them. (checkboxes??)
- The side ‘preview’ was in fact as much as I could get to see. I never could read a mail without scrolling left to right and top to down (not necessarily in this order).
- I overworked my brain, trying to remember which mails I’d read and which I hadn’t (An average of 50 mails a day didn’t work too well in my favour)
-What function did those ‘flags’ serve? While I support patriotism, reverence to an unidentifiable union isn’t something I’m comfortable with.
Just navigating, wading; to find those lecture notes was painfully unfriendly. And then one day IE crashed on my ever faithful laptop. Firefox swooped in to the rescue. I did the routine sign-in and voila!

Screenshot of my mailbox as viewed in Firefox

So the expletives did work, incantation is no myth. Or is it? Up until then I had no idea that browsers can be so authoritative. Just by changing the browser, the look and feel of the UI was radically transformed.

Web browsers do not render pages pixel by pixel. They merely are translators that read the entire code and produce an output depending on your code. There are differences in the code interpretation. So it looks at the way that a page is built and decides how to interpret it. Some browsers support certain coding conventions and not others.Therefore you should check the way your website looks on different browsers and operating systems. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for that. You should check the specificities of each browser that fails to display your website correctly and make the necessary adjustments to your code.

Adobe Browserlab does a pretty good job by giving you screen shots of what your web page will look like across different browsers. There might be many other such providers.
In conclusion, you should test your websites on as many different browsers and operating systems as possible. It is important so as to ensure all your visitors can enjoy the experience you've designed.