One of the biggest problems when designing and developing a new website or rolling out a new look and feel is cross-browser compatibility. Usually the solution has been to have a series of machines, real or virtual, with different versions of the various different browsers out there installed, and then go through each one laboriously.
Fortunately now there is Browsershots which is a web-based browser farm which you can utilise for browser checking. You simply submit an URL to Browsershots and tick the various flavours and versions of browser you want to check against and then wait . . .
Your request is queued and once processed you can view and download screenshots of your site as it look in each of the browsers selected. Because it runs on actual machines these screenshots aren’t kludges, they are the real thing.
5 replies on “Comparing a site across browsers”
Here is another solution which I’ve used successfully: BrowserPool.
Ron
Browsershots is free and the source code is open and available if you want to set up your own testing farm.
I was so thankful to find this site, IE netrender which instantly give you a glance at your page in IE 6 or 7. I really just works.
I have to admit I’ve had less luck with browser shots.
We use BrowserCam and have been very happy with it.
If you’re using a technology like ASP.NET for example then most of the work of making everything cross browser compatible is done for you on the web server by the ASP.NET engine… it detects the browser running on the client and generates the HTML to suit.
If you’re not using ASP.NET then I can recommend a good book here…
Bulletproof Web Design (by Dan Cederholm)