Before I launch into the specifics of the issues I am facing, I just need to ask: Is it a mistake to use IE8 as the reference for building a website, particularly one that uses JavaScript animation? I ask because I have written a fairly simple animation page, mostly from scratch, even with my weak grasp of HTML and JavaScript languages, using IE8 to monitor the progress. I have tweaked the code so that it works just fine in IE8 (compatibility mode turned off), but when I tried it in Safari and Chrome, it does some weird hiccuping in the animation.
I find a lot of questions with the opposite problem: that it works well in everything but IE. So I am wondering, should I be using a different browser for my reference? Or is there a better approach to make it compatible with all browsers? It’s so frustrating (as I am sure most of you will agree) to have to deal with the different interpretations of the different browsers.
Thanks for any help!
p.s. I have not coded yet for Mozilla.
Using ie8 as a reference from a performance point of view is not a bad idea, since it has weak js and rendering performance. Using ie7 is even better.
Cross browser compatibility wise, it doesn’t matter what you use – unless you use a crossbrowser library like jQuery as your base for the animations you will have to write specific code for the various js and render engines.
Even if you use a library like jQuery, you will still run into rendering issues since the various html/render engines are different across browsers. chrome/safari uses webkit, firefox uses gecko etc.
The only way to do it right is to start your project by defining what browsers you wish to support and then test what you do in all of them while you are developing your code.