If your in the web game – you’ll know that it isn’t an easy task to get sites to render in 98% of the browsers out there. Before you even start on a site – you need to work out who your target market is in terms of browsers and cut off the rest – aka – “degrade gracefully”. The term degrade gracefully means that they need to work in (are navigatable, clickable) those “lower” browsers although maybe not look as pretty in. W3 seem to have a fairly good record of the most current stats – you can see them here.

Something’s to help you through the browser blues are the following;

Online multiple screen rendering
One bit of software I use is Browser Cam.  This online application allows you to test in multiple operating systems in multiple browsers – you need a live page to test this on.

This is well worth the money spent and you can see for yourself for free for 30days.

Desktop testing
As you may or may not know after you update your browser you no longer have the previous version – while this is often good as hopefully they have knocked out the bugs it often removes the only testing vessel you had of that browser…

To over come that there are what as known as stand alone browsers – thanks to TredoSoft who have put together a lovely little package of standalone IE versions from 3.0 – 6.0 you can have hours of “fun” trying to get your sites to work. The also have a version of IE 7.0 standalone although this seems to be a little buggy sometimes (you need to do a restart to get it working as it doesn’t like when its brothers and sisters are running).

Check out trendsofts downloads of IE 3.0 – 6.0 here and IE 7.0 standalone here

Alretnatively i have zipped the pair up and put in one file here – NB 25Mb

I will put some hints and ways around hacking your CSS in IE in the near future – in the mean time – have a read here