Today's blog post comes from the Gary Rosenzweig. You can find more of his blog posts at: http://www.MacMost.com
Remember the Great Browser War? Well, we call it Browser War I now that
Browser War II is in full swing. It was Netscape vs. Internet Explorer.
And the greatest casualties were suffered by Web site developers.
Those of us that were Mac users had to buy an entire second computer --
a PC with Windows -- to test our Web sites on. There was no way around
it. Pages that worked perfectly well on Netscape Mac, or even IE Mac,
would look very different in IE Windows. We had to have that Windows
machine to test. OK, we played games on it too, but according to our
tax filings, it was all for serious testing.
Browser War II, despite being just as horrible for the Web sites in the
trenches, is easier on developers. Instead of getting a second computer
to run Windows, we can run Windows on our Macs. I can't tell you how satisfying it is to be able to do this. My newest
PC is a powerful Pentium IV that I bought at the end of the last
Browser War. It sits there and ages. It goes day after day without
being turned on, updated, or virus-checked. I don't even play games on
it anymore.
Meanwhile, on my Mac I've got Windows Vista running with Boot Camp and
inside Parallels. In fact, I've got Vista, Windows 7 and also Ubuntu
Linux running in Parallels. So my testing isn't done on another computer, it is all done on the
same screen, right at my desk. I can have Internet Explorer up and
running in about three minutes, even if booting Windows from scratch.
Then I can test my Web pages live, updating them from my Mac programs
and checking them out in Internet Explorer in Windows. All side-by-side
with one screen, one keyboard and one mouse. One thing I do sometimes is to give Parallels 4 out of my 8 processors,
and 4GB out of my 10GB of memory. Then I go full screen on my second
monitor. So it looks like I've got a Mac and a PC on my desk that
mysteriously share the same keyboard, mouse, and clipboard.
On my Mac I've got an FTP program and a text editor and I am deep
inside my Web site's PHP code. I've got Safari and Firefox running as
well, for testing. And in Parallels I've got Internet Explorer running.
All I need to do is click the refresh button and I can see how my page
looks in what is sadly still the most popular Web browser. And if I want to see how the page looks in IE7 instead of IE8, I can
boot up Windows Vista in Parallels too, where I have kept IE at version
7 specifically for testing.
In the old days, I would have had two Windows machines to see two
different versions of IE running simultaneously.Even if those machines
were somehow free, it would still have been a pain to have all those
computers, screens, keyboards and mice -- or to have had a switching
system to run them all using the same accessories. I remember doing
that for a while, though I'm trying hard to forget.
So thanks to software like Parallels, the Web developers are doing much
better in this second Browser War. We require less time and resources
testing on Windows, which leaves more time for playing games.
