Hello Readers, are you familiar with Cross browser compatibility?

Well in today’s blog we shall discuss about what is Cross browser compatibility.

Number of websites has increased from 2.4 million in 1998 to 1.8 billion presently along with the growth of internet users and mobile users.

Currently 4.3 billion people uses a browser and the most popular browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Edge.

Cross-browser compatibility is the capability of a website to function in any version of the browser.

Generally a web browser helps to fetch information from the web and display them on user’s device.

A web developer must be sure that their website is compatible with every browser and therefore cross browser compatibility testing is required.

For a web page developer it is quite challenging to make the website compatible with different browsers.

Mastering Cross Browser Compatibility

The major aim of the cross browser compatibility is accessibility.

A website must be accessible or work with all versions of all browsers.

Cross browser compatibility should provide all the users with the same experience across all the browsers.

The website nowadays expected to support browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari

If your website is not cross browser compatible then the user will search for another website because a user don’t switches the browser generally.

Normally a website is created by the combination of CSS, HTML and JavaScript.

Sometime a certain feature or technology of a website may not be supported by other browser.

Most often the developers make their website for their favorite browser without considering other browsers.

A website might work perfectly on Google Chrome but may not work on Internet Explorer.

In such situations Cross browser compatibility testing is necessary.

There are several ways to create cross browser compatible website.

Check For DOCTYPE

Different browsers have different standards and rules.

Make sure that you have added DOCTYPE in your HTML file.

DOCTYPE is the first line in code which describes HTML that is used in the website.

DOCTYPE helps the browser to recognize in which language your website code is written.

If you don’t define the DOCTYPE in your website then some browser may understand it themselves but other may not be able to figure out and will render some element of your website in a way that you will not like.

To make your website compatible with Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox make sure that you add Strict DOCTYPE.

Otherwise the browser will work in Quirks Mode and will imitate the behavior of older versions.

Apply CSS Reset

Different browsers have different style; one style may work on one browser and may not work on other browser.

You may have noticed that sometimes Submit Buttons look different on different browser that is because of CSS.

Rendering of some elements in different browsers depends upon CSS.

CSS Reset enables setting the styles of all elements to a baseline value to ignore cross-browser differences which arises due to built-in default style settings.

CSS is s Style Sheet language used to describe the presentation of a document.

Resetting the style enables the web developers to avoid defaulting to the browser’s built-in styles which differs from browser to browser.

Applying CSS reset means telling every browser to remove the styling to default CSS that causes cross browser incompatibility.

Eric Meyer’s CSS reset are used to solve browser incompatibility issue.

Adding a CSS reset is quite simple; you only have to download the CSS File and include it in header.

Separate Style Sheet

Make sure that you link to different style-sheet for every browser using conditional comments so that Chrome will render Chrome’s style-sheet and Firefox will render its style-sheet.

Conditional comments help to link style-sheets for different browsers in case of designing challenges that are common with Internet Explorer.

Use Friendly Libraries and Frameworks

There is a huge list of frameworks and libraries used by website developers to make their work fast and convenient.

Cross browser friendly JavaScript library like iQuery is very popular and widely used in websites throughout the world.

React.js is an open source library backed by Facebook.

It helps to create small and large scale web applications and creating interactive websites.

Glimmer.js is a new JavaScript Library for the web.

Bootstrap is the framework to help with designing websites.

It is the most popular HTML, CSS and JS framework for developing responsive projects on web.

With Bootstrap non-designers can easily create decent-looking websites.

Angular.js is an open source JavaScript framework created by Google.

 Keep The Code Simple

Coding must be simple yet effective.

Avoid ten lines of code to a feature that only needs three lines.

Simple code is cross browser friendly and more maintainable at the time when you have to adjust it for compatibility.

Focus on quality over quantity at the time of coding.

Cross Browser Compatibility Testing

Testing for Cross Browser Compatibility is crucial and should not be missed otherwise all the effort for Cross Browser Compatible Website will go in vain.

Without the testing you will not be sure that whether the possibilities that you have taken for making a cross browser compatible website do work or not.

It is common that you may write something accidently that doesn’t work in one browser therefore check the site which actually works on different browsers.

Use the tool like Cross Browser Testing which gives access to thousands of browsers.

For Example to find Cross Browser Compatibility issues with Firefox Browser the website develop may have to skip some elements that Firefox browsers do not support such as Web SQL Database, XHTML +SMIL animation, File Writer API and EOT Fonts.

Using the technologies and styles that does not support Firefox will lead your website to break even in latest version of Firefox.

Similarly CSS overflow-anchor, Web Authentication API does not work in Safari Browsers.

Web Authentication API is supported in the latest browser versions of Firefox and Chrome and therefore it will not work in other versions; will show Cross Browser Incompatibility problems.

So make sure that you use all browser supported technologies.

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