Cross Browser Testing Makes Sense

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn’t display particularly well on all browsers, but I’m not a professional web designer / developer, so you’ll have to excuse me. It’s also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn’t do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:

Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:
Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft’s Silverlight, but didn’t bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won’t be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn’t available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn’t a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I’ve now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)