Mac users - are they worth the money?
So I finally got around to having a friend check this site on his Mac, and discovered that it is quite badly broken in Safari. Sorry, Safari users!
If you’re a one-man-band development team, it’s likely that even a Mac Mini will be out of your budget for testing purposes – so how do you test?
Apart from relying on friends, there is really only one option; Browsercam is an online service that allows you to submit multiple URLs and view the rendered results on every browser you want to support. Unfortunately, it costs – $20 for a day’s use, up to $60 for a month (although there is a 24-hour evaluation option).
However, to my mind it is still a grossly inefficient means of testing; how much project time will be wasted making minor tweaks to your CSS, re-uploading, re-submitting and then waiting for Browsercam to re-render your screenshots – only to find that it’s still broken? Back to step one you go…
MacChoice
There are two other options. Ditch support for Macs altogether; or only write the most basic of CSS so that you can be pretty sure that it will render as intended across all browsers and platforms.
My site stats (both here and at work) indicate around 2% of visitors are on Mac. That’s a fair percentage to give up on. The alternative may be an option – perhaps rely on absolute positioning and pretend I’m Dreamweaver – but again that would be a lot of techniques to rein in.
I’m really just thinking out loud here. In a perfect world I’d buy a Mac, but I suppose the next best thing will be to read up on the specific quirks exhibited by the most popular Mac browsers, and make better use of the inefficient Browsercam.
Useful links
Safari on QuirksMode.org
CSS Bugs in IE5
Supporting Mac browsers
Filed under: Design.
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Comments
- Kate Bolin
- 2566 days ago
- Horrifically, at home, I’m still using a much-abused old-skool powerbook running OS9, so anything I make there, it has to be tested on PCs, OSX, printers (I can’t do a print preview on my machine because I don’t have any printers installed), etc. etc. etc.
So having friends who are willing to spend five seconds looking over your site is a godsend. It’s the cheap and easy way to test your sites. - #2
- Mike S.
- 2565 days ago
- Check out iCapture by Dan Vine at http://www.danvine.com/icapture/
The site seems to be experiencing some troubles displaying images at the moment. Hopefully they will be fixed soon.
I thought there was another site that offered a similar service for free but I can’t recall what it was. - #3
- Nathan Smith
- 2562 days ago
- I’m like you, I just have friends who are Mac users check sites for me. After awhile, you just sorta get a feel for what quirks work for what browsers.
For instance, it’s darn near impossible to style a Submit button for Safari (it insists on making it a blue aqua one). But, other than little things like that, Safari is a very solid standards browser. - #4
- Matthew Pennell
- 2562 days ago
- Mike S: Thanks, I’ve used iCapture before but I forgot to include a link in the article.
Nathan: Yeah, that’s kinda what I’m hoping will come with experience. - #5
My choice was simple. I bought a mini and will be running Windows either VNC’ed or VPC’ed. Works just as well.