Jun 13

Written by: Joel Taylor
6/13/2008

For most web developers it is necessary to test website designs in a number of different browsers and possibly on a PC and a Mac.  There are multiple ways this can be done but I think I just found a method that is very convenient and has saved me tons of time, browsershots.org. 

My old method

1. Open pre-configured Virtual PC's
   1. Since some browsers can't be installed with others you will need to have multiple virtual PC's
   2. For example IE 6 and IE 7 don't work well on the same machine
2. If I want to take screen shots I would need to do that on each virtual pc and publish to a shared directory.

A few things to note about this method

1. It takes some time to run all of the reports because you need to open each virtual PC and web browser and type in the page to test.
2. Screen shots can all be stored together but you need to be consistent in naming since they are not automatically named and you need to refer to the browser version later

My new method

1. Browse to browsershots.org
2. Select the browser versions and JavaScript, Java, etc. support
3. Enter the URL of the site to test
4. Submit the form and wait for the screen shots.

A few things to note about this method.

1. Screen shots are only available for 30 min
2. You could just download the pictures
3. This only shows you the screen shot it doesn't let you interact with the page.
4. One submit runs all of the reports in a few minutes this saves huge amounts of time.
5. If the customer would like to verify that it looks ok, since they may have customers complain, they can view  the page to see the differences.

Copyright ©2008 Joel Taylor

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