Not a member? Why not join us or log in? (No more hassle filling in comments, less obtrusive ads and asides.)

Test your designs in multiple O/S and browsers the easy way…

Posted by michael on September 19th, 2006.

I make the web work for you. I develop applications that make life easier by helping people be more productive; saving time and money. Also specializing in E-Commerce development using ASP, PHP, Javascript, XHTML, CSS, MySQL, SQL Server.

http://www.michaelrichardmurphy.com

michael has posted 6 articles.

RSS Feed for fadtastic.net RSS Feed for michael

Full Profile →

…let someone else do it!

Andrew mentioned Browsershots recently in his 5 development resources that you may not have noticed post and it’s a great tool so I thought I’d expand on that slightly.

I stumbled upon this tool entirely by accident but after exchanging a few emails with Johann Rocholl, Browsershot’s creator, I thought I’d share some background with you.

Browsershots uses distributed machines run by volunteers to take screenshots of a given website as rendered on various operating systems and browsers. Simply visit browsershots.org and enter the URL of website you’d like to view. Because of the popularity of the service, URLs get added to a queue for processing.

After your screenshots are ready, your URL will be linked to from the ‘queue page’*. You’ll see thumbnails of your website viewed by different browsers on different operating systems. Looking for something specific? This page features checkboxes and dropdowns that let you choose which O/S and browser combinations you’d like to see. Want to see how your site renders in different browsers at a specific resolution? That’s an option. Using a special plug-in and want to see what happens when users don’t have it? You can do that to.

Johann, a computer science student in Germany, had the idea for browsershots in November 2004 after being inspired by similar services that handled screenshots and captures. The distributed computing twist gives users the benefit of the volunteers’ various O/S and browsers.

This is definitely worth checking out for developers who can’t make the hardware and/or software investment to have multiple machines, operating systems, and browsers in-house.

Thanks Johann!

* A word of caution on the queue. As mentioned on the browsershots privacy policy page, the queue and screenshots are visible to all visitors. If you have a confidential client or a design in beta that you’d like to keep private, using browsershots is probably not a good idea.

Share This

Make A Comment

( 12 so far )

blockquote and a tags work here.

12 Responses to Test your designs in multiple O/S and browsers the easy way…

Comments RSS Feed

I really just have to say, that in my honest opinion, screenshots are never the good choice for correcting flaws.

There is many alternatives of checking in multiple browsers - are you a mac-user, you can either run Virtual PC, or with an intel mac, windows itself. The other way around, there is a windows-browser based on the safari engine etc.

When checked through manually, browsershots can be used to make tests in the long run, to make sure everything still looks as it should.

Actually a friend is talking about setting up such a service with remote desktoping, so it would be possible to test things out realtime in other OS’es.

Thomas Silkjær
September 19th, 2006
#

That’s really weird that IE6 in Windows - probably the most-used browser on the most-used OS on the planet isn’t even an option! This really is aimed more at Linux user with a slight head-nod in the direction of Microsoft Windows, and Apple Mac OS X.

Another site worth considering (although there is a fee) is SiteVista: http://www.sitevista.com/

…an excellent service for people who want to take their testing seriously.

Matt Robin
September 19th, 2006
#

Or maybe it’s aimed at the crowd that have IE6 on Windows and want to test other browsers without setting up virtual PCs etc?

Andrew Faulkner
September 19th, 2006
#

There’s also BrowserCam: http://browsercam.com/.

You can capture for any browser with reasonable market share on Linux, OS X, or Windows. Various screen sizes, timers before it captures to allow long loading pages to finish, etc… some plans even include VNC Remoting to do interactive testing. If you’re not up for the prices, there’s usually someone running a campaign on Fundable (http://fundable.org) to split a corporate account.

Chris
September 19th, 2006
#

@Chris-
I know Johann cited browsercam as one application that inspired him to create browsershots.

Michael Murphy
September 20th, 2006
#

The whole issue is that you cannot rely on screenshots to see how a webpage really behaves. You can guess some CSS bugs, eg IE margin problems, float drops. But you cannot test a script, bump up fontsize, and scroll a page.

It is really the last resort. And it is very limited plus time consuming, since you need the wait a while.

Nothing beats the real thing.

Johan
September 20th, 2006
#

What I’ve taken to doing lately, for testing in IE in particular, is to use VNC to connect with the laptop at the other end of the house. This way I can check everything in IE and Camino, without having to give up my G5 :)

garrett
September 20th, 2006
#

Being a recent convert to an Intel Mac, I find that using Parallels desktop with VMs of WinXP helps me tremendously in visually troubleshooting my cross-browser sites. Parallels is a low-cost, easy to implement solution that (I think) any serious web designer with cross-platform consistency in mind should explore.

Joyrex
September 20th, 2006
#

Thanks for all the great comments. I didn’t realize there were so many other options.

Michael Murphy
September 21st, 2006
#

Wonderful find! I just tested it out and am glad that standards for the most part have really come a long way in making things consistent between multiple browsers and platforms.

Terry Ng
September 24th, 2006
#

At least for IE7 and IE6 there is a new, faster rendering alternative: IE Web Renderer. Images are destroyed immediately after rendering, so privacy should not be a concern with this service.

pollyx
November 11th, 2006
#

As someone already mentioned here, a better alternative to Browsershots is installing an emulator or a virtual machine. I’ve just downloaded "Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image":http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=enI’m a webdesigner and need to test my designs in IE6 which’s still being used by many and I have IE7 installed. 

WDG
January 23rd, 2008
#

↑ Jump up to the comment form

Related In Some Way, Shape Or Form

The above post has obviously kept you amused. Why not discover similar material:

The posts test everything — 100+ tools in one!, The Best Blog Designs From The Technorati Top 100 | David Pitlyuk, Leading By Example, Review of XHTML/CSS, Will Software Ever Make Us Redundant?, are related to this post.

Or why not take time out to find out about the author of the post.