Reputation: 37719

Methods to check the look of a web page on different browsers

I would like to be able to see how a web page looks on different browsers before releasing it. I have several on my machine, but I cannot check different versions of IE, and other browsers, and I cannot check other OSs. I know of http://browsershots.org/ but this takes ~30 minutes at times, thus it can be problematic for troubleshooting.

Upvotes: 4

Answers (9)

Peter MK

Reputation: 133

I would recommend to you:

Offline free method: Downloadable IE versions (several VM versions): modern.ie

In Windows 8.1 Pro you can use Hyper-V (its included in the system), If you can't see it after search, probably you need to turn on in Features

I would not recommend IE tester, the results are not good.

Upvotes: 0

neoneye

Reputation: 52191

If speed is a problem then I can recommend Litmus. It is really fast at generating screenshots, but it's quite expensive.

Upvotes: 0

Rob Kam

Reputation: 10268

BrowserPool makes it possible to test different browsers on different Mac, Windows and Linux systems via a VNC-client.

Upvotes: 1

allesklar

Reputation: 9590

@eulerfx, you are not telling us which OS you work on. Like other posters I achieve what you want with a mix of using virtual machines (VM) and IEtester.

Since I develop on a Mac (I'm a switcher after 20 years on Windows and very happy having done so) I test the sites in Firefox 3 and Safari 3 on my OS X machine, on a Windows XP VM I test Firefox 2, IE6, 7, and 8 using IETester plus whichever other browser i want such as Opera and Chrome. I also have a second VM running Ubuntu for those rare cases my web sites need that type of compatibility as well.

My work flow is to first build the site for FF3. Once I'm happy with the task and the look I check all browsers in the order given above. If you have a specific problem in IE6 for example, you can then get immediate feedback for your changes made to the IE6 stylesheet using conditional comments.

I use Parallels to create VM's on OS X. There is a version of Parallels running on Windows but many other vendors have similar offerings.

Upvotes: 0

Rob Williams

Reputation: 7921

Consider the Selenium product, which can run an automated test suite through a variety of browsers, and do it all local (or with virtual machines).

Upvotes: 0

EBGreen

Reputation: 37720

I would suggest using Virtual Machines of one sort or another. The discussion here would probably be helpful for you.

Upvotes: 1

Mark Brittingham

Reputation: 28865

Virtual machines are the classic solution to this problem. However, if 30 minutes to run through a full suite of browser tests is too long for you, I'm not sure that anything can help!

Just to clarify: Browsershots lets you test a lot of different browsers and browser versions. I think it quite reasonable to test them all in 30 minutes. However, if you have a target browser that does test poorly, you'll obviously want a locally installed version (thus the role of Virtual Machines) for the testing/change/retesting cycle. That is what I was after when commenting about the 30 minutes!

Upvotes: 0