Even though the Microsoft servers were down part of the day on Friday, I was lucky enough to download the Windows 7 Public Beta and install it on a dedicated test machine. Being a web developer, I was interested in seeing if there would be any rendering differences across browsers as opposed to the machine performing better than Vista. I’ve never really had any problems with Vista. My primary development machines are running Mac OS X and I have a single machine running Windows on Boot Camp for testing IE7/IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. For the most part we follow Yahoo’s graded browser support. However, we’ve dropped support for IE6 and most clients are okay with that as long as it works in IE7 and IE8. If a client really wants IE6 compatibility, we don’t have an issue supporting it, but at the request of the client.

Safari is really the only browser across platforms PC and Mac that visually looks equivalent. Most of the issues I had seen in the past had been due to things like anti-aliasing. While most clients aren’t that critical on the look, they do question why it does look different on PC platforms vs. Mac platforms. Most people just want it to look and function pretty similar in all the browsers. While you can’t compare IE across operating system platforms, you can compare Firefox and Safari. You can definitely see a difference in Firefox on the PC platform vs Mac and the look in Firefox on PC more closely matches IE8. Some clients like consistent looks of buttons for form elements, and until only pretty recently were developers able to skin those buttons without having to jump through hoops.

When comparing Windows 7 and Vista, I didn’t notice any differences in how things looked. I’ve been testing in IE8 on Vista for a little while, so I’ve already adapted some of the issues with that. I think the multiple browsers are finally starting to converge to standards. It’s not perfect by far and still plenty of hacks in the CSS, but we’re definitely in a much better place than we were years ago. It’s refreshing to see and I hope progress continues on the matter. If you are interested in upgrading your test machine to Windows 7 I have yet to see any issues.