Last week I’ve done the DOM Core tests in new browsers: IE8 final (in both IE8 and IE7 mode), Firefox 3.5b4, Safari 4.0, Chrome 1 and 2, and Opera 10a. I found no surprises.

After that I decided to continue with mobile browsers, of which I have 15 lying around on my desk. Unfortunately I could not test IE Mobile (old) because it supports only inline event handlers, Skyfire because it does not allow you to remove alerts, and the Opera runtime in the Vodafone widget manager for terrifyingly complicated reasons I still have to describe properly.

Still I managed to test the other twelve and found a few surprises.

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In his recent Feature testing CSS properties entry, Juriy Zaytsev (Kangax) discusses the possibility of detecting CSS support by means of JavaScript. Although he rightly points out that this method has its drawbacks, as far as I’m concerned he doesn’t go far enough.

This sort of testing should not be used at all. Ever. The methodology is plain wrong. Browser compatibility tests are to be done by hand. Any automated system is useless, because it will give false information.

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Phew, the last two weeks have been a blast, but also a bit tiring. I went on a visit to San Francisco in order to speak at the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference, and since I was in town anyway both Yahoo! and Google invited me to do a tech talk. I returned home on Friday, and on Saturday I spoke at the Amsterdam Widget Dev Camp organised by Vodafone NL. Fun, but wearing.

As you may know by now, I’m currently heavily engaged inW3C Widgets research, so it’s no surprise that three out of four of my presentations treated this topic. As usual I’ve put the slides online.

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