Multiple Browsers Testing

July 19, 2007 on 3:39 pm | In General, Web apps |

It’s been a while since I last posted something. I apologize for that, but I have been fairly busy in my job recently. So, this time I’m going to give you some useful information I’ve learned in my job lately.

It started from a time when one of my clients was using (are you ready for this) Firefox 1.0. If you are one of the unlucky souls who don’t understand the meaning of this — Firefox 1.5 had been the “standard” Firefox for about a year or more, and Firefox 2.0 has been out for at least a month or two (or more; and I’m not even the type who keeps myself that updated). He told me that the page didn’t look right and he was using Firefox, so I wondered for a while before finding out that he was on Firefox 1.0.

So I figured there is actually a need to install multiple versions of Firefox for testing. Surprise! There are actually ways to install multiple versions of Firefox as well as IE on your computer, without having multiple computers or doing any sorts of virtualization. Oh, and this guide is for Windows users. If you’re doing any sort of frontend design, Windows testing is your main target, no matter how much you like Mac or Linux yourself.

Installing Multiple Versions of Firefox

I will try to make this your one-stop guide to doing this, so I will include every link you’ll need here. First of all, to give credit where it deserves, I first got my information from dojotoolkit.org.

If you attempt to simply install all 3 versions of Firefox separately and run them normally, you will always only open the latest version you have installed, no matter which executable you run. By following these steps below, you can run Firefoxes 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 side-by-side.

1. First, to get old versions of Firefox, you should go to this oldversion.com link. Firefox versions older than 1.5 are not available on the official web site, so you will have to get 1.0 on third party archive sites. I recommend 1.0.7, that’s the one with the “latest” bug fixes from the 1.0 series. Note: As far as I know, rendering engines have no differences between subversions of 1.0 (or that of 1.5, or 2.0). So you only need to get the latest 1.0.
2. As for Firefox 1.5, at the time of this writing, it is still available on the official Firefox site. I recommend getting it from there, since they have the latest 1.5.0.12, versus the 1.5.0.7 on oldversion.com.
3. Run the installations for Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 1.0. Do not install them at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox. Instead, rename the installation folder to Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (and 1.0). At the end of the installations, when asked if you want to launch the program, click No.
4. Go to the two respective installation folders, and rename the firefox.exe file in there to firefox1.5.exe and firefox1.0.exe correspondingly. This is not a required step, but I recommend it because you’ll able to tell their differences in Task Manager.
5. Then you need to create a .bat file for both of these versions. Make a new file called firefox1.5.bat (and firefox1.0.bat for the second one), and paste these lines in it. Of course, for the 1.0 version, change all the “1.5″ occurrences below to “1.0″.

   set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
   start "Firefox" "C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox 1.5\\firefox1.5.exe" -P "Firefox1.5"
   set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0

6. Run the .bat file. The first time you run it, Profile Manager will come up and ask you which profile to run with. Create a new profile with the respective name (”Firefox1.5″ for version 1.5, and “Firefox1.0″ for version 1.0, as it shows in the .bat file lines above).
7. When Firefox runs, you will have all new bookmarks and everything, and the About window tells you that you are on the right version. By using the .bat file, you can run all versions of Firefox at the same time. After running for the first time, you will not get the Profile Manager that asks you for profile anymore.
8. Lastly, I recommend creating a .bat file even for your latest (2.0) Firefox, for maximum clarification. Use the same file content shown above, but take out the “1.5″ occurrences. For the profile name, use -P “default” instead.

That’s it!

Installing Multiple Versions of IE

Doing this with IE is way simpler than with the Firefoxes, thanks to some kind folks who developed a program called MultipleIE.

1. Install IE7. Yes, you may feel free to overwrite your IE6. You will get it back later, so don’t worry about it.
2. Go to Tredosoft and download the Multiple IE software. Follow all instructions on the web site and on the setup program.
3. You’re done. Did you expect more steps?

Simple enough?

Conclusion

Now, you have on your Windows PC Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0 as well as IE versions from 3.0 to 7.0. As a good web developer (especially a frontend one), you should be testing for as many browsers as possible and make your code work for as many of them as you can. Safari and Opera are other browsers you should consider supporting. (You no longer need a Mac to test for Safari! )

There is also Camino, but it uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, so you can assume your site will work with it as long as it works with Firefox. As a bit more information: Safari and Opera use their own rendering engines which are different from Firefox. However, both follow web standards (defined by the W3C) pretty well, so most of the time you won’t get too frustrated with them. Internet Explorer is really the only one that likes to stray away from standards (even now in IE7), but it’s also the most commonly-used one. What can you do, right?