Comments on: Cross-Browser Ajax: It Don’t Come Easy http://www.musingsfrommars.org/2006/05/cross-browser-ajax-it-dont-come-easy.html I've been observing personal computing behavior for a long time, and now I have some things to say. Here are my two cents about computing, music, software, and related topics. Sat, 02 May 2026 06:00:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 hourly 1 By: Leland http://www.musingsfrommars.org/2006/05/cross-browser-ajax-it-dont-come-easy.html#comment-303 Leland Wed, 10 May 2006 20:00:59 +0000 http://www.musingsfrommars.org/?p=802#comment-303 Attila, it's true that Safari is available on for the Mac... for the moment. Now that the browser is open-source, the WebKit team is working on a project to port it to other platforms. (See http://webkit.opendarwin.org/projects/portability/index.html) However, your 2 cents is really a cop-out. I don't have a Windows machine for testing IE, yet I manage to do so, by using one of the services available on the web for testing your code on a variety of platforms. I always keep this URL handy since I can never remember the names of these sites... I know I've paid to use browsercam.com, before, and it's great and not very expensive. However, the best option, which is free, is <a href="http://www.danvine.com/icapture/" rel="nofollow">iCapture</a>, which lets you enter a URL and then see a screenshot in a few minutes. The guy that runs it just recently started a service for IE7... <a href="http://www.danvine.com/iecapture/" rel="nofollow">ieCapture</a> which works the same way. Here's <a href="http://www.danvine.com/iecapture/view/?jid=9227" rel="nofollow">a screenshot of this website</a> produced just now with ieCapture. So do screen captures solve the problem you're raising? Well, no. But they certainly help... you can tell if something's wrong with your code and decide to take additional steps. For example, <a href="http://www.browsercam.com" rel="nofollow">browsercam</a> offers a remote hosting service that actually lets you use one of the "alien" operating systems for a certain period of time at what seem to me to be extremely reasonable rates. For $19.95, you can have a full day of "Unlimited access to 30-minute Remote Access sessions on Windows, Mac and Linux machines." Safari is a minority platform, but it's a heckuva lot larger audience than Opera, for example. It takes a little more work to test on Safari, but it's your responsibility if you're going to develop Ajax/DHTML scripts and promote them as being cross-browser, cross-platform. And it's not a whole lot of work if you know what to do. Attila, it’s true that Safari is available on for the Mac… for the moment. Now that the browser is open-source, the WebKit team is working on a project to port it to other platforms. (See http://webkit.opendarwin.org/projects/portability/index.html) However, your 2 cents is really a cop-out. I don’t have a Windows machine for testing IE, yet I manage to do so, by using one of the services available on the web for testing your code on a variety of platforms. I always keep this URL handy since I can never remember the names of these sites… I know I’ve paid to use browsercam.com, before, and it’s great and not very expensive.

However, the best option, which is free, is iCapture, which lets you enter a URL and then see a screenshot in a few minutes. The guy that runs it just recently started a service for IE7… ieCapture which works the same way. Here’s a screenshot of this website produced just now with ieCapture.

So do screen captures solve the problem you’re raising? Well, no. But they certainly help… you can tell if something’s wrong with your code and decide to take additional steps. For example, browsercam offers a remote hosting service that actually lets you use one of the “alien” operating systems for a certain period of time at what seem to me to be extremely reasonable rates. For $19.95, you can have a full day of “Unlimited access to 30-minute Remote Access sessions on Windows, Mac and Linux machines.”

Safari is a minority platform, but it’s a heckuva lot larger audience than Opera, for example. It takes a little more work to test on Safari, but it’s your responsibility if you’re going to develop Ajax/DHTML scripts and promote them as being cross-browser, cross-platform. And it’s not a whole lot of work if you know what to do.

]]> By: Attila http://www.musingsfrommars.org/2006/05/cross-browser-ajax-it-dont-come-easy.html#comment-302 Attila Wed, 10 May 2006 14:53:40 +0000 http://www.musingsfrommars.org/?p=802#comment-302 As much as I feel for the Safari users there is a side of the story you are forgetting to mention. In order to have code running on Safari you need to be able to test it. IE, Firefox are browsers widely available, they are not commited to one OS, one platform. You want people to code for Safari and not only IE, Firefox? Write to Apple, ask them to make OS X or Safari platform independent. Ask them to make Safari reachable for everyone without paying for an extra computer. Than you can blame developers for being lame. But until that happens, please blame Apple for not being a team player. Just my 2 cents. Attila As much as I feel for the Safari users there is a side of the story you are forgetting to mention. In order to have code running on Safari you need to be able to test it. IE, Firefox are browsers widely available, they are not commited to one OS, one platform. You want people to code for Safari and not only IE, Firefox? Write to Apple, ask them to make OS X or Safari platform independent. Ask them to make Safari reachable for everyone without paying for an extra computer. Than you can blame developers for being lame. But until that happens, please blame Apple for not being a team player. Just my 2 cents.
Attila

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