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Browsershots

Sep 08, 2008  By Phil Hughes

One of the first things you learn when you put up a web page is that things just don't look the same in different browsers. At Linux Journal we certainly had a lot of "did you check the page in X" experience where X was some browser that wasn't happy with what we had put up.

Well, my friend Mario in Costa Rica sent me a link to browsershots.org which seems to be a better answer than having a handful of computers with a handful of different operating systems and a bucketful of different browsers in the office or a lot of friends that you can ask a favor of all too often.

browsershots.org is a web page that is designed to directly replace your long list of friends. It offers a choice of 80 different OS/browser combinations. All you have to do is check which ones you want your page tested with, put in the URL and click submit. A few minutes later you can view the results as screenshots.

For example, I submitted NicaLiving.com to browsershots.org to 58 different OS/browser combinations about ten minutes ago. I have 29 results that I can view individually or download a file that contains them all. All in all, a pretty amazing test tool.

______________________

Phil Hughes

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Another browser screenshot application

Vasya's picture
Submitted by Vasya (not verified) on Mon, 08/31/2009 - 11:08.

Another approach is to use a specialized browser screenshot application, such as BrowserSeal. Although it currently runs on Windows only, Linux version will be released soon.

That's very nice site Very

Gerald's picture
Submitted by Gerald (not verified) on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 01:45.

That's very nice site
Very nice list of work. I think this article done a great job.What a best way to describe your view

WOW, that's cool! I never

David B.'s picture
Submitted by David B. (not verified) on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 14:06.

WOW, that's cool!
I never knew anything about browsershots. That's a very useful tool. Amazing actually. Been looking for it since long time ago. Great post mate. You saved me a lot of time.

- David
Bebo Upload webmaster.

That's pretty cool Phil. I'm

Jed Flack's picture
Submitted by Jed Flack (not verified) on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 06:29.

That's pretty cool Phil. I'm just working on a new website and it is proving to be a right pain because I have different stylesheets for different pages and Internet Explorer always seems to throw my page in to a mess! I'll have to give browsershots a try to get the problems sorted quicker.

Jed (Webmaster of Beds for Home)

nice site

mosh's picture
Submitted by mosh (not verified) on Thu, 11/06/2008 - 07:15.

That's very nice site...
i renember that when i was working in one company
i was check site in ff, opera, ie7, ie6, ie5
But this site make it for me.. and it's much more os/browsers :)
nice to know this web :)

greetings, mosh from forum which looks good on all os/browsers (exept ie6 and lower :P)

Without a doubt it is a

rg's picture
Submitted by rg (not verified) on Wed, 09/10/2008 - 14:31.

Without a doubt it is a great tool for testing the design of a site. But you cannot really avoid actually testing your site in different browsers, since JavaScript for example may work in one but not in the other.

Selenium

OwenJH's picture
Submitted by OwenJH (not verified) on Mon, 09/08/2008 - 08:20.

Cool, I didn't know about browsershots before I'll have to give it a shot. Check out Selenium, it can also be used to QA websites across platforms. Although it doesn't quite span the amount of browsers it can help with testing website functionality and design across multiple platforms. http://selenium.openqa.org/selenium-rc.html

Owen (thelinuxblog.com)

could also try crossbrowsertesting.com

tonetheman's picture
Submitted by tonetheman (not verified) on Mon, 09/08/2008 - 14:12.

You could also try another service that lets you run a session for 5 min. http://crossbrowsertesting.com

You can test ajax calls there.

if you just want to check

benjamin's picture
Submitted by benjamin (not verified) on Mon, 09/08/2008 - 08:54.

if you just want to check how IE handles it http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ is quick and fast

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