This is totally not posted because Chris Mills is sitting next to me, although his presence here did prompt me to try this out.
- Internet Explorer cannot, by design, run alongside itself — e.g. IE6 and IE7 (although hacks exist). This is a pain for web development and testing sites. The hacks that exist don’t fully function.
- Safari cannot, by design, run alongside itself — e.g. Safari 2 and Safari 3. This is a pain for web development and testing sites. There is a hack for Safari 2, but Webkit builds require you to close Safari and run one at a time.
- Firefox cannot run alongside itself — e.g. Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 or 3.0-alpha.
So to test in those browsers, I have to work through them one by one. I can never compare rendering in Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 2.0, because Firefox locks itself to your profile and reports that it is already running when you try to launch a different version simultaneously.
Opera is awesome because you can start up different versions of the browser all at once, no questions asked, no problems.
Other browsers would piss me off far less if they would do the same; it would be a great help during development.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.