Testing your website in multiple browsers

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KayJay

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Anyone serious about developing their own website will know that having it work across the main browsers and platforms is one of the most important things to ensure in order to have the highest number of people view your website.

As a webdeveloper I can tell you how frustrating it is do handle multiple browsers, but Adobe have come up with a lovely little tool that'll go some way to alleviating that. It's called BrowserLab.

Running a website through BrowserLab will allow you to see how it renders in all the popular webs browsers, including old versions. It's still in development but every now and then they allow new members to sign up for an account, so if you can't get an account just now, try again later, or join the mailing list / twitter.

Currently it won't allow you to interact with the website, instead it shows renders of how your site looks. Very handy for spotting design discrepancies. It's not as reliable as actually viewing your site in all the browsers, but it does save some time and from my experience is pretty accurate.
 
It's good. I've been using it for a while now in conjunction with my mac and windows boxes and so far it's pretty close. There's an onion skin mode too so it overlays each render on top of each other so you can see how closely your site resembles it's original design in all browsers at once. A few more handy tools too.
 
I've been using that for a while too, it is great!
 
Hrm- I remember using an even better tool at work, which loads up a version of the browser in another window of whatever site you want- and you can browse etc. Will remind myself of the name of it tomorrow.
 
aligibbs said:
Hrm- I remember using an even better tool at work, which loads up a version of the browser in another window of whatever site you want- and you can browse etc. Will remind myself of the name of it tomorrow.
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You have to be careful with emulators, because they're not entirely accurate. I've seen a few and so far, BrowserLab seems to be the most accurate thing.
 
Of course, if they'd made Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6 standards compliant, we'd never have had this problem.

Gotta love the button in IE8 that is used to display sites that were hacked to work in IE7, but now don't work properly as IE8 does things right (ish)
 
It's terrible. Basically so many people have infrastructures reliant on IE that if MS were to discontinue 6 and 7 a lot of people would have issues, mostly their own business customers. I wish they operated like everyone else, upgrade of the software upgrades installed software, not install another application. Even IE8 isn't entirely standards compliant. Sometimes you have to wonder if the IE development team isn't entirely made up of chimps. The whole switch thing in IE to check what version of browser it is and assign a stylesheet accordingly is a joke. I hate IE so much sometimes. I hate Firefox just as much because every time a new version of that is released it seems to get slower and slower.
 
Aw! Nice.
 
Safari does this if you turn on the developer menu, although its IE implementation is not the latest version. Not sure if the Windows version of Safari does it though. Its not bad though if its a simple site and not commercial.
 
I used this, it's really good. Although I did get really excited when I'd seen that I'd had over 40 hits to my website in one morning when I checked into Analytics, before the penny dropped :D
 
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