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.