reflections

Do you design web sites of any type - from blogs to full-blown corporate e-commerce solutions? Perhaps the only site you design is your own one? Well, one of the problems that faces every web designer at some time is that of testing your site on all the major browsers. In case you’re interested, this is how my current visitor’s browser useage breaks down:

Having three of four versions of each major browser installed at the same time and on the same machine is not only an administrative nightmare, but damn near impossible too! If you’re lazy like me then you probably end up testing on just the very biggest ones - I typically test in IE6, IE7, Firefox 2 and maybe Opera. What about all the others though - the MacOS browsers (particularly difficult if you only have a Windows machine) and the Linux builds?

Well, I’ve discovered [via thepaperbull.com] an easy way to not only test your site on the usual suspects, but also to see what happens to it on other platforms and more obscure browsers!

Browsershots.org allows you to enter your web address, select from an enourmous list of browser/platform combinations, choose screen resolution and plugin availability - and then a little while later (dependant on how long the queue currently is) will generate screenshots of what each of your selected browsers saw when they hit your site!

I think this is an incredible idea - and like all good ideas I’m amazed that this is the first time somebody’s done it! Oh, and did I mention that this is a FREE service?!? Well, what are you waiting for - the end of the browser wars?

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