Further information > Web browsers and the WebSite X5 browser

A Browser is a program that lets users display and interact with the information (text, images, etc.) in a web page. The most widely-used browsers are Microsoft Explorer®, Firefox®, Safari® and Google Chrome™.

Browsers use a rendering engine to display web contents. A rendering engine is a program that downloads contents (an HTML page, for example) and formats the information on it (associated CSSs, for example) and shows them on the screen. Browsers use many different rendering engines, and these differ for the rendering quality, with respect to the standards, and speed. So, pages may appear differently according to which browser displays them. However, as a web page is not printed, a certain margin of difference is acceptable, if the user's experience is not damaged by this.

The best way to obtain web pages that are compatible with the main browsers, in their various versions, is to create a clean code that adheres to standards.

WebSite X5 automatically generates HTML5 code with associated CSS 2.1 or 3, and guarantees full compatibility with all the main browsers and mobile devices, such as mobile phones, tablets and smartphones.

When you are working on a project, you need to be able to check the final result and how the website will be displayed once it has been published. To do this, WebSite X5 provides a Preview button, that is always available (see The work environment), which gives you a preview of the website on your computer. It is constantly updated (see Update Preview while editing the Project in the Preferences window).

To display the preview, WebSite X5 uses its built-in browser, based on Chromium (http://www.chromium.org/), the open source browser that gives its name to Google Chrome™. This browser has the following commands:

	Back Return to the last page visited.
	Next Go forward to a previously-visited page.
	Home Page Go to the website's Home page.
	Address bar This shows the path of the page on display and/or lets you enter the path of the page you want to display.
	Go This loads the page indicated in the path. You can also load the page by pressing the Enter (carriage return) key.
	Edit this Page This goes back to the Program, opening the page displayed as a preview by the browser in the Page Creation window, so it can be edited. If the page is part of the Blog, the Members' Area or the Shopping Cart, this button takes you back to the relative section in Step 1 - Website Settings \| Advanced.
	Preview the WebSite on another Browser You can view a sub-menu that lists all the browsers that are installed on your computer. When you click one of them, you will see a preview of your website displayed in a new window of that browser, and so this feature lets you check how each browser will display your website.
	Mobile Preview This opens a window that displays a QR Code and a URL address. When you have connected your mobile device to the PC, you can either scan the QR Code or go to the URL to display a preview of the website and check its behavior.

If you have decided to create a responsive website (selecting the Responsive Site option in the Resolutions and Responsive Design window), WebSite X5's built-in browser also shows the Resolutions Bar. This bar shows the active breakpoints for the project. As well as the Resolutions Bar, the following commands are also available:

Resize the window according to the breakpoints

Click on the triangle on the button to open a menu showing all the active breakpoints for the project. Click on a breakpoint to automatically resize the browser window to the associated resolution.

Show object display order

If you use this command, you will see each page object's display order number superimposed on the contents.

When the browser window is open to show the preview of the page you are working on, the page that is displayed changes automatically according to the page displayed in the main browser window.

Using a built-in browser to display a preview of the website under construction has the following advantages:

▪	the preview does not replace the website page displayed in the browser window;

▪	the preview of the website under construction is updated in the built-in browser's window and new windows in the default browser are not opened.

Web browsers & the WebSite X5 browser

Web browsers & the WebSite X5 browser