Cross-browser development
This will not answer your question, but just an advice based on my personal experience.
When you are developing for many browsers, the best thing to do is to test simultaneously on all of them while you're coding.
This way you will just have to correct small bugs each time as opposed to overwhelming complicated layout problems.
Cross Browser Development
No tool can ever make up for bad behaviour, but they can sure make life easier on you.
That being said, you should really come up with a workflow that lets you optimize for cross-browser compatability in the least amount of work spent. If that means small iterative or large monolithical steps for you, well that is up to you to decide. But generally working against several browsers during development saves you if not time at least a major headache on d-day.
List of tools/resources I find useful
- Selenium is a tool for frontend testing
- IETester lets you view a page in different IE versions
- Browsershots lets you view the page on different platforms as well
- Google lets you search for known and obscure IE perversions
- IE 6 No More saves you a lot of headache not bothering about the preshistorical crap that goes by the name of IE 6
- YUI Graded Browser Support - make sure you know which browsers to focus on
- jQuery - cross browser javascript library
- YUI 3: Reset CSS - reset your CSS (link contains useful information as well as the CSS)
- 9 Most Common IE Bugs and How to Fix Them - very useful tips on how to get the most bang for the buck by fixing the common problems first.
- Cross browser development contains lots of useful tutorials regarding cross browser development.
References
Selenium alternatives / Cross Browser Testing / Litmus