Aug
14
2009
Well if you’re like me, you like everything to look good in every browser (except IE6). Of course you can use sites like BrowserShots but there is a few things terribly wrong with it (enough to make me not actually use it). The load times are horrendous for starters, upwards of 10 minutes to an hour in some cases, probably due to the popularity of the service. I think you can pay for faster load times but that isn’t what we want (do we?). And there is way too many browsers already pre-selected. There should be common browsers and then older or less common browsers. I guess it needs a better UI is what I am getting at.
Well once again Adobe have come to the rescue with Adobe BrowserLab a.k.a Meer Meer. My first impressions are that it is unbelievably fast compared to other similar services. It also renders multiple browser images (yes, images, I thought it was straight HTML at first) at one time, so you can “onion skin” your selected browsers and see where objects are skewed. For example I found out IE7 renders the video page incorrectly on this site.
This free service by Adobe is still in beta so I suggest you get in quick. It was only by luck that I got in; I decided to see if it was usable after trying to find a multi-browser preview solution. You can find BrowerLab here and you need an Adobe ID (also free).
Included Browers/OS:
- Firefox 3/XP
- Firefox 2/XP
- Firefox3/OSX
- Firefox 2/OSX
- Internet Explorer 7/XP
- Internet Explorer 6/XP
- Safari 3.0/OSX
As you can see there is no support for Linux or Chrome (yet?). I’d expect Firefox on Linux to display similar to other operating systems. Firefox2 and Firefox3 usually display identical pages, same for IE6 and 7. Also, Chrome uses Webkit and so does Safari! Perhaps Adobe is still sorting out a deal with Google or still porting it over as everything is presented through Adobe Flash Player.
Also note, you need to comment out or remove any conditional statements that prompt the user with a JavaScript alert box. I just PHP-commented it out or you could add letters in some places to make it invalid.
Remember, sign up while you still can!
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