<tip type="http headers" author=".jeff">

want to see what http headers are going back and forth between your browser and the server for every page you visit? well, if you're using internet explorer you're in luck. there's an awesome little utility implemented as an explorer bar that fits the bill perfectly.

</tip>

<tip type="Validation made easy" author="Kristina Floyd">
If you are a keen Mozilla user or are perhaps considering changing your browser of choice.

Mozilla now have a fabulous tool called Checky which is a tiny little plugin that can be downloaded and then when you press F10 it will validate the page you are on using a huge variety of validators.

I beleive it can also be used within Netscape.
</tip>

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Make sure you have javascript enabled, then click "start the installation." I found it incredibly buggy in Moz 1.2b, but it seems OK in 1.3.

Stephanie Smith

For those experimenting with Apple's new browser, here is an add-on that enables a debug menu.

It allows one to see the DOM tree, Render tree, and View tree, change the UA string (which looks like it can change automatically??) by selecting from "Debug" menu.

Boris Mann

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And for those that don't feel like downloading a whole program, it's as simple as typing one command into the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Of course, you'll want to do this while Safari /isn't/ running.

Jim Puls

"I've been using Tantek's excellent favelets for jumping to the W3C HTML and CSS validators in Mac IE5.1 One click and you are looking at the validation results of the page you came from. Is there a similar deal for Mozilla?"

Well, I use Tantek's validation favelets (including Multivalidator) in Mozilla's favorites toolbar without any problem, so that's always an option. You will have to name them via the bookmark management tool to avoid having unlabeled bookmarks, but that's a one-time annoyance at most.

For those who are wondering, the tools in question are available at http://www.favelets.com/.

Eric A. Meyer

Most modern browsers have gzip decompression built-in, and will automatically uncompress content that is compressed in gzip.

When a browser requests a page from a webserver, it will send in the header of its request a parameter called "Accept-Encoding" with a value of "gzip, deflate" as an example. This means the server can check to see if the browser supports gzip compression, and if so, compress the page before sending it back....voila!

The difference it makes to a site that has a lot of text-based information is nothing short of astounding!

Simon Lee

IE won't let go of an old IP address for a site?

try c:\>ipconfig /flushdns ... then try again.

<tip type="Mozilla" author="Jeduthun">
Use Mozilla? Go to Web sites and find yourself asking "I wonder how they're doing that" but are too lazy to go to the trouble to find where the source code is for the effect (who wants to go to the trouble of searching for and downloading external CSS or script files in the code)? Check out these way-cool bookmarklets!

http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html

They display all kinds of useful stuff about the page you're currently on: the contents of all the stylesheets that are loaded, all the scripts that are loaded, etc. Drag 'em to your browser's link bar and enjoy hours of code voyeurism.
</tip>

I have a Mac. I test my sites on the following browsers:

- MacOS X:
IE 5/Mac
Chimera (Mozilla)
OmniWeb
iCab
Opera

- Classic
Netscape 4.7

- VirtualPC
IE 5/Win
IE 6/Win

VirtualPC allows you to manage several different Windows-Installations and start/stop them at will, so I can run different Windows Browsers at the same time without problem. Netscape 4.7 doesn't run in native MacOS X and hopefully never will, but I can still run it in Classic.

Personally, I think this testing environment is almost perfect. I probably could install the Linux browsers using Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/), and I used this to also check in dillo, but it ended up being quite pointless since dillo is pretty bad at rendering almost everything. Maybe I should try again now that you can install KDE using fink.

Lucas

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Just though I'd let you know I've done exactly that, Konqueror is not too shabby, although far from the best browser about at the moment, it's
definitely handy for testing though.

Altough you need to have most of the KDE stuff installed you don't actually have to run KDE itself, I use WindowMaker and although it doesn't 'match' visually with Konqueror I can launch konqueror from a term for testing pages. In fact I've just added Konquerer to my WindowMaker dock, so I don't even have to bother with that.

Virtual PC is on my shopping list too, plus a bunch of extra ram ooh, and a second monitor - that would make my ultimate testing setup.

Why any one-person-shop would want to buy several power hungry, heat emitting, and ugly PC's *just* for testing when they could have a single mac with Virtual pc is beyond me.

Adrian

<tip>
While being non-free VMWare lets you have half a dozen (or more) versions of Windows installed at once. You can put a different version of IE on each to test pages in different versions.
</tip>

<tip type="virtual desktop/emulator software" author="Shashank Tripathi">
Apart from VMWare, you could also consider Connectix's Virtual PC. A cinch to install, and quite fast in its renditions of the other OSes right on your desktop.
</tip>

For the best and most comprehensive source on *How to Make Opera Work*, check out http://www.searchengineworld.com/opera/faq.cgi

"Can anyone point me in the direction of a WAP browser that runs under Windows?"

I've been told that WinWap is good.

Jason

<tip>
http://themes.mozdev.org for less-fugly themes which work with Mozilla 1.0
</tip>

Find Mozilla at http://www.mozilla.org/.