Firefox X.XX (in Not Too Sexy Then)
OK you’re happily web developing away in the bunker of your office, everything’s hunky dory, Firefox works, Opera works, Safari, Camino, yup, yup. Chrome, yup. Finally you pull out the big bad brother we’re all unhappy with this millenium – senor Explorer. OK it’s time to publish. Senor Explorer has his exploring boots on.
But what they hey?! The office bat-phone rings. “Yes, yes, seriously?”. Firefox has an issue, scrollbars on sections of the content rich footer. The client insists it’s in Firefox and you jump in your pedal car and pull into the driveway two doors away with a screeching sneaker. There’s no time to waste, the world is ending because some bastard pixel is shunting and munting too far in some direction under the guise of Firefox.
You get inside. There. There in front of your eyes the shining Firefox logo AND SCROLL BARS. You check the Help / About Mozilla Firefox menu. Yes it’s version 1.3. What can you say? You said their site would work perfectly in Firefox. Was that a bold claim?
This short parody happened to me recently (without the pedal car) and brought home a truth (that I’d let slide) about browsers being released in relatively close iterations. Particularly Firefox and Opera, but no doubt others. How can you guarantee users are upgrading? You can’t. In reality it’s no longer as simple as saying a new site works in Firefox (looking at the latest version) or Opera. Which version? You need something like Browsershots or Browsercam and other emulation tools, or simply lots of testing and versions of everything. It’s more complicated than ever. I admit this was a low priority job with minimal budget, but it’s a good reminder. We don’t have any control over the users environment. End of story.
