Test Design in Firefox first, IE, Or does it matter?

Hi, I learned CSS and HTML many years ago right here at Sitepoint! Its been a years since I’ve done any front-end development.

Back then it was pretty much standard practice to develop in Firefox and tweak the page for other browsers especially IE. It was not a good idea to develop in IE and then try to make it work in other browsers.

Has that general rule changed? My company has lots of web pages that look good in IE but not so good in other browsers. They are functional but not very nice looking. I told them they were developing backwards based on my knowledge but things might have changed.

Which browser has the best support for standards? Most of our users still use IE, so i have to develop with them in mind. I only need to support IE 8 on up. The project requires HTML5 and CSS3.

thanks!

I prefer to validate pages and CSS scripts.

Usually if there are no errors or warnings the page will render with only minor discrepancies.

There is little difference between how closely the latest versions of the popular browsers support the standards so it probably doesn’t matter which modern browser you test in first.

If you need to support older versions of IE such as IE9 then you will probably need to run further tests there afterward

So IE 9 is considered an older browser now?

Thanks guys!

IE9 is nowhere near as standards compliant as more modern versions such as IE11.

IE9 is also the last version to support conditional comments and jScript and the first to support JavaScript - so there is plenty of opportunity for it to behave differently from modern browsers.

That is good to know! Thanks!

u need to test for all the major browsers and use different cc for each browser using browser detection and browser sniffing
i suggest you test using chrome, ie and firefox
but you should be guided by your targe population if you know what type of browser they use

Browser sniffing was long obsolete by the time IE3 was released.