For reasons likely harder to write, I now have numerous iterations of myself at multiple web application sites, including 3 Google accounts (mail, reader, docs, calendar), 2 del.icio.us accounts, 3 flickr accounts. I hate having to log in and log out to do tasks, so I rely on multiple web browsers I can have myself logged in as different entities, using Firefox, Safari, and added today, Camino.
- Firefox is for all of my cogdogblog stuff, a Google home page, a Google calendar (which actually mixes shared items from a series of other calendares I have in a separate NMC account), perusing my daily blog fixes in Google reader, a del.icio.us account that i tag for multiple projects, my primary cogdog flickr collection.
- In Safari, are a few services used exclusively for the NMC Campus Observer, our Second Life outpost. I have a completely separate del.icio.us account used to tag items to push to the blog as a resource collection as well as a separate flickr account just for our SL photos (also pushed to the blog)
- For a new web project to be opened next week, I had a need for yet another Google Reader account (to aggregate resources, and use the Share features to create a clipping and RSS feed we could push to a new blog), and yet another flickr account, for another collection of photos to be syndicated to the blog.
I hope this trend will stop soon…. but if it does not, I can still run Opera and …
On my PC’s I use two web browsers- Firefox to test the font size differences across Mac and PC, and Internet Explorer to see how bad the CSS support blows up, followed by a few hours of tweaking in a web standard browser to try and adjust. Of course, now I need multiple PCs so I can see the differences in IE 6 vs 7.
I’m not using much in the way of web services on the PC side, though in Firefox I use the google browser synch tools to keep bookmarks and logins aligned- its worked great now across 2 macs and 2 pcs.
For testing websites in various browser/platform combinations I find http://browsershots.org handy.
Yes, Andy, thanks for mentioning BrowserShots, a rather awesome utility for checking a primary layout. Often though, for testing functionality, I do want to experience the entire site in its own quirky browser.
For internet explorer, the rub was you could only have on version running on a machine (any other install would overwrite an existing version). A few clicks back, I had done the semi-hack of getting several versions running on the same machine, and in looking for the reference links, I found tis sweet intaller which puts a separate version of IE 4-6 on your machine; so you can install the latest and ???est IE7, and use this to have available the older ones.
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
Frankly, I barely have time to design on a webstandard browser (Firefox) and then down check on IE6 and now 7.