I’m looking for feedback on peoples experiences with developing sites that work across browsers. It seems to me there are at least two obvious ways to approach the task of making your site/webapp work across browser:
- Constantly test across all supported browsers every step of the way; or
- Pick a browser, get everything working in it as a reference implementation and then make all the other browsers match the reference implementation.
Each approach has an obvious drawback — the problem with #1 is that you end up doing a lot of unnecessary work — especially if you are developing a webapp that is going through a lot of iterations/prototyping/spikes etc. You will make a bunch of stuff work across browsers that will subsequently be discarded/removed.
The disadvantage to approach #2 is that while it makes the initial development much quicker and more painful it makes it much harder to figure out where some of the specific errors arose, especially for more complex issues — whereas if you had been developing for all browsers at once you should catch it right away and know what change(s) introduced the problems.
A somewhat obvious third option would be a hybrid approach, but it seems to me that you would end up losing more by experiencing both of the problems with #1 and #2 than you would gain from the benefits of doing both.
What have you found to be the most effective way(s) to approach this challenge?
I’ve found that if you get too deep into developing a website without looking at other browsers you’ll quickly get to a place that is too much of a headache to debug. I consistently open my web pages in all the browsers I care about.
I strongly suggest you verify all browsers each time you make a large change to the site.