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Tag: browsershots

Techy: Cross Browser Testing

February 17, 2009
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For a while now, I’ve been a great fan of Browser Shots to test websites in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera without having to install all of those web browsers (and previous versions) on my machine. However, it does have a snag: you can only test “static pages”: you can’t interact with the page in anyway (so if you wanted to see if a drop down menu worked well in IE 5.5, you’re out of luck).

However Keyboardface has just blogged about a service I hadn’t heard of before called Cross Browser Testing.com which gives you practically a VNC/remote desktop/LogMeIn style connection to a remote computer (which seem to be Virtual Machine images) which has a selection of browsers installed for you to interactively test on. It’s pretty cheap: there’s a free option, $1 for 5 minutes option (with discounts) or a “pay per month” option. It’ll be worth considering when I’m needing to test the site I’m working on on multi-platform and multi-browser scenerios.

Net: Checking Sites on Multiple Browsers

February 21, 2008
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Until yesterday, if I was doing a design for a website I would either need access to multiple machines with multiple different web browsers on multiple different operating systems – or (and this is the route I took), just set up virtual machines (I used Microsoft VirtualPC which is free of charge) to get as many environments running as possible and then just cross my fingers.

But no longer is this needed! I’ve just come across Browsershots.org which generates previews of your website in around 60 different browsers/browser versions/operating systems with you giving the chance to specify if Java/Javascript/Flash should be enabled or disabled, which screen resolution should be used, what colour depth etc. So if you’ve been developing in a 1280×1080 64million colour Windows Vista with Windows IE 7 environment, but wanted to check it looked ok on Safari on an Apple Mac in 800×600 or Epiphany 2.20 on Linux FreeBSD 6.3 in 8 bit colour, now you can!

It is free of charge by default, although you can pay just $10 a month for “priority previews” if you wanted.