Anyone who has designed a website or blog knows how tedious it can be to make sure it is cross browser compatible. You have to test in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and now 8. You have to test in Firefox, Safari, and the list goes on. It can be a daunting task and I know I dread it every time I’m done with the CSS for a site.

Well, instead of pulling up Parallels every time I needed to test in Internet Explorer on Windows XP, then Vista, then Safari, Chrome, etc, I decided to find an alternative solution.

That’s when I came across Browsershots.

Browsershots is a free website where you can test out your website or blog on 50+ different browsers. They have everything from Internet Explorer to Chrome to browsers you’ve never heard of before.

Simply enter your URL, select which browsers you’d like to test it on, and hit Submit.

After you hit submit the process takes place automatically. Simply sit back and hit refresh every so often to see your new screenshots start to appear.

Once your processing is done you can roll over each to see a larger view. If something looks off you can click that view and see more details.

These details include the browser name, the engine it’s based off of, as well as many other important details including whether or not Java is enabled, what version of Flash it’s running, the operating system it was on, and what the screen dimensions were.

These are all very important details when trying to troubleshoot problems you may see on your screenshot.

When you’re done, go back to the results screen to take a look at another screenshot.

You can also download all of these screenshots in a ZIP file which contains PNG files of each screenshot.

Once you’ve looked at your screenshots, determined, and fixed any problems that you saw, you can then hit “Request new screenshots?” to refresh them and try again.

This certainly saves a great deal of time and ensures that your site looks great in all browsers.

Keep in mind before you spend hours fixing your site for a certain browser you check your site analytics to make sure a decent percentage of your users are using that browser, if any.

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  1. Trace on January 29, 2009 8:40 pm

    Love it. It’s interesting that they are getting actual screenshots from a system running the os/browser chosen as opposed to running some sort of virtualization or the like… I am definitely going to check this out with a few projects but disable most of the browsers… after all most developers I know are pretty much only interested in testing for IE 6 and up, Firefox and Safari…. and maybe Opera… interesting stuff though…

  2. Friday Blog Scan: Things we liked from the week that was | Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate on January 30, 2009 1:33 pm

    [...] for about 25% of the market now, so this us just plain unacceptable. So we were delighted with James Shiner’s post over at GeekEstate, which explained a simple tool for testing your site for [...]

  3. Ki Austin Real Estate on January 31, 2009 3:24 pm

    That is freaking awesome. I hate installing multiple browers just for testing. And I hate hearing from someone about a site “yeah I opened it in x browser and nothing came up”. There is so much wierd junk out there on on the net is always nice to see someone come up with that is really useful.

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