I’m Looking For a PC
- April 14, 2004
- 6 comments
Notice anything wrong with the wording in the above screenshot? I took it a few minutes ago on Sony’s site. I guess I need to hurry to buy their “lastest” PCs. I hope they give me their bestest deal!
Seriously though, I do need to buy a PC so I can view how my Web designs look in Internet Exploder on a PC. I thought if I had the design looking good in IE for Mac, it would be the same on a PC. WRONG!!
One of my clients’ sites looked great in every browser for the Mac, but didn’t look right in IE for PC. I borrowed my friend’s laptop over the weekend and fixed that site, my personal site and another design I’m currently working on, making them all look good on every browser, Mac and PC. It was nice to know for sure how they looked on a PC without having to ask a friend to send a screenshot.
So I realized I needed to buy myself a cheap PC that has XP on it so I can check these things out myself, when I need to. Does anyone out there have a PC they’re wanting to get rid of for a decent price? I don’t want a dog PC, but I don’t have the money for a high-end Sony either. So if anyone has one they’re wanting to sell or knows of a good deal somewhere, let me know!
You’re right. I don’t mean “every” browser. I mean most popular browsers on their platforms. So that would be IE, Mozilla and Opera on the PC and IE, Safari and Mozilla on the Mac.
Mozilla/Firefox for Mac/PC/Linux are 99% the same across platforms. So it’s pretty safe to say if it looks decent on the Mac, it’ll look decent on a PC. Of course, the bit that differs is the screen real-estate used by the browsers.
IE for Mac and IE for PC are NOT the same. In many ways, IE 5 for Mac is more standards compliant than IE 6 for PC. In fact, IE 6 for PC sucks when it comes to standards.
If it looks good in Safari, it’ll look good in OmniWeb (another up-and-coming Mac browser) as well as any other OS X browser that uses the same rendering engine. This also goes for Konqueror in KDE 3.2 and up.
Macs tend to allow for taller pages, PCs are skimpier with it, at least with default settings. So it’s always a good idea to check a design with the above browsers on both platforms. If it looks good in those, then it’ll look good for about 95% of your traffic.
For people still using Netscape 4, all I can say is UPGRADE ALREADY!
Hey Chris — I’m a fellow EE user on a Mac. I use Virtual PC on my Powerbook, and I find it’s a lot cheaper (and more convenient) than actually owning a PC. You just drag the files you want to test into the PC window, run them, and viola, you can see how terribly broken they are and start pulling your hair out right now instead of later!
Also, there’s a way to install all versions of IE from 5.0 to 6.0 on a PC (including Virtual PC) at the same time, so that’ll make your testing process even faster still.
Love your site by the way! I check it often.
That’s a good idea about Virtual PC. I’ll look more into it. I’m not sure why I didn’t think about it earlier.
I guess it’s not obnoxiously slow on your Powerbook? Is it a RAM hog? Right now, I’ve got a 1st gen 17” iMac with 512MB RAM. Do you see any performance problems with those specs?
I also checked out your site. Very nice! Where in China do you live? I’ve always wanted to visit China. Perhaps I will someday.
HOPEFROST
Vince
May 16, 2005
I used to use VPC 6 with Win 98 for the same reason you will (may be) do. I run VPC 6 on a dual 1 ghz G4 (512 Mo Ram) and now on a last gen Powerbook (1.67 Ghz 1 Go Ram). It’s slow but for testing web pages it’s enough. I installed Netscape 6.2 (i don’t support NN 4) and Firefox. They run quiet well too. I didn’t try VPC 7 yet. To complete your statement on IE Mac and IE win, beware IE 5 PC and IE 6 PC may have some DIFFERENT bugs (they sucks both anyway)
Hate to nitpick, but you really don’t know your site looks good in <i>every</i> browser until you’ve tried it in every browser. Didja check it in IE 5, 5.5 and 6? Netscape Communicator? NCSA Mosaic? HotJava?
I’m not sure myself at what point one can say “good enough”, since obviously most people really can’t test every browser, nor is it profitable to go all-out for that. More particularly, I’m not sure at what point one says “Well, it worked in browsers X, Y and Z, so it should also work in any other reasonably standards-compliant browser”. Checking in IE for Winders, of course, is a must, plus NC4 if you’re at all serious (however, I personally take the approach that if they’re using NC4, it’s not my fault they haven’t upgraded by now
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