Develop with Firefox/Safari, then Internet Explorer

Browser compatibility is one of the most tedious task to take when developing websites. It's an overhead in the development just to make sure everything works fine. And we need to work on at least 3 major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari) just to make sure 99% of the visitors sees your website how you want it to be.

The problem is that since Internet Explorer holds more than 70% of the browser market share, windows developers automatically debug their websites mainly with it and works down with compatibility in other browsers. This is obviously a big mistake since IE falls short on conformance and other standards.

The best way to address this and hasten your compatibility tests is to use standard-compliant browsers like Firefox, which is the second mostly used browser. If you are developing with Mac OS 10.5+/Safari 3 and later versions, you could be very sure of your design will work well. Therefore, once you mainly work on any of the 2 browsers, you could be 99% sure it'll work on all browsers and you'll just have to tailor compatibility with IE (because it's the dominant browser).

Finally, to easily test it on all browsers just go to BrowserShots website and simply enter a webpage you want to test.

Design Meltdown

I've been interested lately on the best practices of web design and while surfing, I came across this very interesting website from Patrick McNeil called Design Meltdown. And I thought it'd be useful to all designers out there. It's very unique since he listed down several different possible design elements [e.g color, techniques, site types] and when you open a particular design element, it gives you a short description of it and sample usage. These sample usage are screenshots of different websites that uses that design element.

You don't need to surf anymore for various websites just to look for a particular design. It's all in here. It's like an archive of several nice websites grouped together by its common element. I used to go to Template Monster just to look for designs whenever I have a new project. Well not quite anymore. Thanks to Patrick McNeil!

Looking for sketchy designs? Check out Design Meltdown.