I regularly do front end development(html,css,js) and need to test websites for ie7, ie8, ie9, firefox, chrome, safari, opera in windows.I would like to move to ubuntu, but am concerned that testing websites might get very difficult.Do I have any options besides having windows as virtual machine ?
For a complete answer:
Firefox, Chrome (or its FOSS counterpart Chromium) and Opera have native Ubuntu (or more generaly Linux) versions. They handle the same as the Windows version. In other words, you can get a version of these browsers that will run under Ubuntu without any problem.
For both Safari and IE, you have two choices (well 3): the first option would be to run IE and Safari for Windows using Wine & Winetricks. Wine emulates the win32 API, so that applications built for Windows can run on linux. The second option would be to run a virtual machine. That virtual machine could run a minimal version of windows so that you could use IE/Safari for Windows on there. You might even want to create an OSX VM to run Safari for Mac.
