I think all you basically need to test it on is IE and Firefox. Almost all the other browsers I have looked at display almost the same as Firefox. IE is the only weird one.

I only use Notepad2 for web development, but if you insist on using a visual IDE, then I guess DreamWeaver creates the least bad code.

To test browsers, you'll need to use one of those online services, or you'll need to have multiple machines with various settings.

Another vote for Notepad2. One thing text editors can be quite bad at is mixed syntax highlighting - that is, the ability to highlight HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript and so on correctly within a single file. Notepad2 can handle that for you.

PHP Designer is also quite nice, but the free version of 2007 loses this "mixed" view. The 2006 beta has this view, but has a number of bugs (it is a beta, after all).

Microsoft offer a free Virtual PC image (and Virtual PC 2007 is also freely downloadable) for testing IE7 and IE6 alongside eachother. I have IE7, IE6, IE5.5, IE5.0 and IE4 installed under XP and they all work rather happily - the limitation is that sessions don't seem to work on the older browsers, and each browser thinks it is IE7 so conditional comments do not work (JavaScript reports the "correct" version, however).

Quote:Original post by blackbirdblackbird1
I think all you basically need to test it on is IE and Firefox. Almost all the other browsers I have looked at display almost the same as Firefox. IE is the only weird one.

Unfortunately you think wrong, you should ideally test on as many browsers as you're able to access without difficulty.

If you're writing good clean code you're correct in that you'll generally only experience major difficulties on IE, but there can often be small inconsistencies between other browsers as well, especially once you start adding in things like &#106avascript or fancier css features or doing a fairly complex layout. I quite often have to make small tweaks for Opera, and there are often a couple of 'gotchas' to watch out for on Safari.