The software market has witnessed exponential growth. This has been accompanied by changing customer demands. Today, people want reduced time-to-market and cross-browser compatibility. They need their apps to work seamlessly across multiple devices and platforms like smart TVs, mobile, tablets, laptops, and OS/browser combinations.
How do software developers achieve this? Let us explore options that can help avoid cross-browser compatibility issues.
Validate your HTML and CSS
Different browsers handle app codes differently. While some might correct minor syntax errors independently, in others, this might result in errors and faulty performance issues. Avoid these coding errors by writing well-aligned codes. Ensure you indent and match the opening and closing braces. Insert comments wherever required.
Validate your code before you run it on a browser. Some popular and effective tools that can help with this include Jigsaw CSS validator, W3C HTML validator, JS Formatter for HTML, CSS Lint, and JS Lint.
Maintain layout compatibility
To make responsive apps work seamlessly across devices and platforms, you must perfect your layout and standardize it to enhance its compatibility across environments. Some reasons that result in layout incompatibility include unresponsive layout designs, browser support not available for some layouts, and different browsers render layout designs differently. To overcome this challenge, you need to maintain cross-browser compatibility using:
- HTML viewport Metatag: This ensures proper spanning of the content across the device screen.
- CSS Multi-Column Layouts: This helps to maintain a multiple-column content layout based on the layout supported by the container.
- CSS Flexbox and Grid: This helps to align child element layout content with the available space.
Most modern browsers support these tools. Developers can easily use them to ensure layout compatibility effectively.
Use CSS Resets
Most browsers have a pre-defined default design layout. This gets applied to all websites that run on them. You must override it to apply your layout design; otherwise, the same design will be rendered differently in different browsers. Use CSS reset style sheets to achieve this CSS override or CSS reset and eliminate layout design issues. Some CSS reset sheets popularly used by developers include Github-based Normalize.css, Eric Meyers CSS Reset, and HTML5 Reset.
Check DOCTYPE tag
Developers use the DOCTYPE keyword to define the rules they want to use in the codes. You generally define DOCTYPE when writing the code so that a web browser knows the rules and does not malfunction. Outdated web browsers like Internet Explorer would look for the DOCTYPE tag at the code beginning. The absence of this keyword would result in the improper rendering of the app. Currently, browsers operate in 3 modes. They are:
- Full standard mode: Browser follows W3C specifications to check for errors. This checking is generally strict. Therefore, ensure your code matches all W3C specifications to make them work seamlessly in full standard mode browsers.
- Almost standard mode: Only a few quirks are implemented here.
- Quirk mode: Browsers do not perform meticulous error checks. This mode provides backward compatibility and is hence ideal for older browsers. The layout generally adopts a non-standard behavior here.
When browsers encounter missing DOCTYPE tags, they immediately adopt the Quirk mode. Also, a browser not supporting HTML5 will result in unresponsive tags and an incorrect webpage display. The DOCTYPE error can be easily solved by including the following line at the beginning of the codebase.
!DOCTYPE html
Do this diligently to get a flawlessly rendered site for every browser.
Provide support for an App’s Basic features
Cross-check the application to ensure it provides native features across different browsers. If any browser does not support a particular code, the application should immediately provide another set of codes for use on that specific browser. Doing this ensures that the app's basic features are always available. This concept is known as feature detection. You can write down your own feature detection code for JavaScript and CSS or use feature detention libraries like Polyfill and Modernizr.
Testing on real devices
Virtual environment/machine testing is not very effective. Apps have to be tested on real devices to avoid cross-browser compatibility issues. But gaining access to the innumerable devices currently in the marketplace is almost impossible. However, you can use certain cross-browser testing tools to avoid this yet ensure complete cross-platform compatibility. While some tools allow manual testing of test cases, others let you automate and execute them.
Alternately, some platforms also help you test cross-browser compatibility on real devices by providing access to a real-device cloud with more than 3000 browser combinations.
Using cross-browser compatibility supporting libraries/frameworks
Make your life easier using standard frameworks and libraries supporting cross-browser compatibility. For example, you can use jQuery, ReactJS, or AngularJS for JavaScript. For CSS, popular frameworks/libraries include Bootstrap, Foundation, or 99. Using well-known frameworks and libraries is always smart because they offer good community support. You will find easily available answers to a number of cross-browser compatibility challenges that you might encounter.
Start your cross-browser testing early
You should start cross-browser compatibility testing as soon as you complete designing one page of an application. By detecting compatibility early, you can seek an effective resolution without having to undergo any additional stress. Detect issues early by adopting an iterative approach wherein you keep testing as you develop. Define the set of tests you want to run for different browsers. This approach will prevent you from missing things between test runs. Always start with the difficult browsers first so that most of your compatibility issues will be resolved by the time you reach the easier ones.
Incorporating vendor-specific function prefixes
When you are writing CSS codes, always take into account the browser you are defining for. Writing codes appropriate to the browser will help resolve many cross-browser compatibility issues. If all developers diligently use browser-specific prefixes, they can eliminate many cross-browser issues. Some common prefixes that you can keep in mind are:
- (-webkit) for Safari and Chrome
- (-moz) for Mozilla Firefox
- (-o) for Opera
Checking for JavaScript issues
Some JavaScript-related cross-browser compatibility issues can be mitigated by judiciously using the JavaScript Library. Older browsers might not support the latest JavaScript features like ES6/ECMAScript. Use JavaScript Transpiling to convert ES6/ECMAScript-based codes and make them run on older browsers.
Conclusion
Cross-browser compatibility testing gains immense significance because not testing for this will result in avoidable errors. So consider the points mentioned above to make cross-browser compatibility an enabler, not a software development bottleneck.
