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Testing for Safari when you don’t have OSX
Developing using Microsoft technologies can make it expensive to test your site for other browsers and platforms. IE, Firefox and Opera can ease (or maybe that’s make things harder) to test your site. However, the big bugbear is OSXs Safari. Well until the OSX86 project managers to make it legal to run OSX on any PC I think it boils down to…
- Buy a Mac – nice if you afford it
- Use a screen shot service – pain to use if your site has any kind of dynamic changes, lets face it they’re a pain to use full stop
- Use another KDE based browser
Option 3 is the one I’m currently recommending. Safari is based upon the KDE browser engine, so why not use another browser that uses the same fundamental rendering engine, e.g. Konqueror. Well, the first problem is if you’re running Windows there currently isn’t a version for good ole’ Windows. The answer is turn to Linux, well sort of. My advice is to get hold of the VMWare player with a downloaded image of your favourite flavour of Linux, mine is Ubuntu (if only for the name). Install Konqueror and off you go, Safari like browsing without OSX. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but you’ll iron out the most obvious problems.
Well I’ve since learnt that this isn’t as useful as it first seems. I’ve now had two occasions when Konqueror as done some odd (or not worked at all) and Safari has been fine. So…accept no substitute!
