We just keep a couple spare, old win laptops around for testing on IE. They have Win7 with IE9, plus VMs for <IE8, access over the local network. It's easy to create a bookmarklet that sends URLs over to them so you don't have to type.
Also, neither Chrome, Safari or Firefox behave exactly the same on win/mac/linux. Delicate layouts and javascript-heavy apps still have to be tested.
IE9 has a large share of the web, and is still growing. It's a perfectly ok browser (except for lack of WebGL). Not supporting it or adding a "not optimized for..." message reeks of "Optimized for 800x600" in the old days. Users shouldn't have to pay the toll.
And please, if you are going to do this, do not block browsers by UA. Show a warning, whatever, but just don't lock them out. It's annoying.
(function(){
var data = { data: location.href }
jQuery.post('http://api.openkeyval.org/myownkey', data)
}())
And on each client you have a screen-sized iframe + an "update" button that triggers:
$.getJSON('http://api.openkeyval.org/myownkey', function(data){
iframe.src = data
})
You have to remember to use your local IP address, not localhost. I ended up making a small nodejs server so we could use websockets and drop the update button.
You can do something similar with Synergy. Laptop acts like another monitor, e.g. mouse over to the left and your keyboard and mouse now control the laptop, and cut&paste between machines mostly works too.
Synergy works well, although it is old and unobvious how to set it up. I haven't seen anything better yet :-) However, I only used it between Linux and XP (I use virtual machines now).
Also, neither Chrome, Safari or Firefox behave exactly the same on win/mac/linux. Delicate layouts and javascript-heavy apps still have to be tested.
IE9 has a large share of the web, and is still growing. It's a perfectly ok browser (except for lack of WebGL). Not supporting it or adding a "not optimized for..." message reeks of "Optimized for 800x600" in the old days. Users shouldn't have to pay the toll.
And please, if you are going to do this, do not block browsers by UA. Show a warning, whatever, but just don't lock them out. It's annoying.