Thinking about a switch - how do you deal with browsers? (Web designers/developers)

I am thinking about a switch, but as a web designer I am bit concerned about browsers. Mac internet browsers display fonts a bit different that PC's ones. How do you cope with that? Is there any way to make sure a web site I create will look all right on IE or FF (PC) without installing XP (parallels/boot camp)?

Thanks

 

you could just stick with a PC and not have this issue.

 

I know you asked for a method without using parallels/etc. but honestly I think this is the way to go.

Even outside of dealing with things like font rendering differences, there will always still be quirks between the OS X and Windows versions of Firefox. And of course, with IE7, there is no Mac equivalent, so you'd still need a way to test in that no matter what.

That's really the thing..... I've seen a few different things in Firefox on OS X and Linux that are different from Firefox on Windows.

For a web designer, the investment in Parallels and a Windows license to be able to run the Windows version of Firefox and IE7 would be worth it.

It's the only way to have surefire testing (and actually provides some convenience, since with Parallels you can easily have a VM with Windows and IE6, a VM with Windows and IE7, Firefox and then a Linux VM as well) and test everything for Windows, Mac and Linux all from one machine.

-Zadillo

 

Yeah, unless you really want osx, you are probably better off staying with windows. Since Safari is out for windows as well, you don't need osx to see if your web pages work properly. Remember that Parallels costs $80, plus whatever Windows costs nowadays. Unless you use boot camp, then you would only have to worry about the windows license. OSX is worth it imo, but it's really up to you, like how zadillo said, there is no other method besides Parallels, VMWare, or Boot Camp.

 

Yeah, if there's going to that much trouble...I'd say just stick with Windows to be absolutely sure (of course, you can run Windows on the Mac as well, but you've stated you'd rather not do that). As for Firefox, there's Firefox for Mac, and if it looks alright on FF for Mac, it'll work fine on Firefox for PC.

 

Thanks, guys. Maybe I will wait for LED screens in HP/Dell or buy MBP + Parallels which should solve the problem.

 

Safari/FF on Windows uses Windows fonts, Safari/FF on Mac OSX uses Mac fonts until all browsers support OpenType fonts we're a bit stuck.

However what I do is setup font preference lists for my websites, ie if a computer has Helvetica it will display Helvetica if not it goes to the next on the list. I usually go with Helvetica first as this appears on Macs and PCs it is ever so slightly different but not enough to mess your page layout up.

The font-family command is what I use.. you can use this command in your CSS file too to save having to use it on every page.

http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/lesson4.asp <-- good examples of how it can be used along with other useful font control commands.

When I want to typeset a web page with no risk of it messing up, or if a client requests a particular font to be used, I just use image slices and typeset in Illustrator or Photoshop to create an optimised jpg/gif (or png rarely).

I hope this helps!

 

I know HP has said they will be moving to LED's (and I think they have at least some models, maybe a tablet model, with LED-backlighting already).

Dell of course already has the XPSM1330, and the upcoming XPSM1530 has an LED backlight as an option (making it the first non-Apple 15" machine with an LED on the market, at least as far as I've seen).

The XPSM1530 might perhaps be worth looking at if you're interest in the MBP was more about the hardware features (light weight, 15" LED-backlit screen, etc.).

 

You could also get a used PC off craigslist or someplace for like $50 to test.

Not only do fonts look different, but, you have to test on ie6 and ie7, if not even ie5.

If you do a lot of Flash work you probably want to test lack of flash plug-in and flash player 7, 8 and 9.

If you are a serious web developer, it's not a bad idea to have a machine dedicated to testing.