Website Design
2009 December 9
It’s Finally Ready!
Google releases Chrome for Mac and Linux
Chrome has been out at least a year for the PC, but unfortunately for us on the Mac (and Linux by default) there hasn’t been anything to use but the rather good Safari or the (in my opinion) slightly disappointing Firefox.
I say disappointing with regard to Firefox because, as a web designer, I have to be able to test web pages. And unfortunately to-date, Firefox has a page reload issue which leads to misinformation. An example: I make a change in the code of the website, go to Firefox to test it, reload the page (shift-refresh) and there’s no change. So I try another change and test it out and there’s still no change that I can see.
Well, actually there is. It’s just the browser doesn’t accept a forced reload of the page. It relies on the cached version. So it displays the version of the page that’s in memory rather than retrieving a new one. Even if I’m testing locally.
This is fine for the majority of people, and Firefox is still an improvement in security and a number of other features on most web browsers. Unfortunately it led to many hours of hair-pulling and frustration for this little black duck.
I stuck with Firefox because of the rather good “Firebug” plugin, which meant I could look at the underlying code of the site. But once I was told about the developer settings in Safari, I moved over and haven’t looked back.
So in short, I’ll be downloading a copy of Chrome, but it won’t be the browser-o-choice for most tasks. It’ll be a testing ground.
But, I hear you say, what about PC browsers and the heinous Internet Explorer 6?
I’ve tried VNC Fusion and even Parallels (and Virtual PC on the old mac G4 hardware) and they’re all astonishingly resource-hungry. As a virtualisation system, they’re rather good, but you need licensed copies of Windows and an individual windows install for each version of Internet Explorer and a cartload of memory so you can run them.
This is the equivalent of a badly run car: a hole to throw memory into.
So as an alternative, I have a licensed copy of the WINE port (haha, couldn’t resist) Codeweavers Crossover Mac (there’s one for Linux too). This will run individual copies of Internet Explorer on their own, no OS needed.
Yes, it costs me a little money, but it’s worth every penny (and it’s cheaper by far than the alternatives above).
For a quick look at a website, I use the rather good browsershots project. This lists every browser known to humanity (and some I’ve never heard of) and you can click the box, enter your website URL and see what it looks like.
There’s a limit to how many you can test against in one 24 hour period of course, so I am sparing with this, but for the major browsers on windows (IE 6-8) it works a treat. And if you want to use more, you can buy a monthly pass.
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