Browser Compatibility Checking Made Easy

AbbieRose · Post #1 (**permalink**) 10-21-2008, 06:53 PM

Someone linked me to this site when we were talking about how we check our pages for browser compatibility. http://browsershots.org/ is the site and I'm pretty impressed all told! It will give you a screen shot of each of the browsers you select to test, and saves having a huge number of browsers at your disposal.

You have to reload the page to see the shots, and it takes some time, but patience brings good things!

The-Pixel · Post #2 (**permalink**) 10-21-2008, 11:48 PM

Hello,

I've been a big fan of this website for many months now. It is a wonderful website not only for web developers but, for any individual. Thanks for sharing.

MikeDVB · Post #3 (**permalink**) 11-10-2008, 06:39 AM

It's good once you have a "final" version of your site that you just want to verify to make sure you didn't miss anything.

I personally have a VirtualPC for Windows Vista, Windows XP, Ubuntu, and MacOSX and I check IE5, IE6, IE7, IE8, FireFox 2, FireFox3, Safari, Opera, etc... on all of these different systems to ensure that everything displays as it should.

It's not as easy as just loading up a site in a browser but when you do a lot of design it can be useful to be able to pull up an OS in a few seconds and have a view than to wait the (sometimes up to 30~45 minutes) for popular OS/Browser combinations from browsershots.org.

EdGrier · Post #4 (**permalink**) 11-12-2008, 08:49 PM

Very cool tool. Thanks for the post! Waiting on my results now...I'm scared to be honest!

LT Smash · Post #5 (**permalink**) 12-03-2008, 02:28 AM

I might have to try and use this sometime, even though many of my designs aren't overly elaborate, this can really help so I can make sure it appeals to everyone, bookmarking it now.

handsonhosting · Post #6 (**permalink**) 12-11-2008, 09:03 AM

There's a few of these sites out there, and browsershots seems to be one of the better.

I'm disapointed at times as some of the browsers they list they really can't check and produce zero results.

Also, if you do decide to run these checks DO NOT click ALL

If you have an older machine, processing ALL on your site can slow your site down. We had a customer contact us a few weeks ago that they ran an ALL scan on a Celeron 1.4 with 512MB ram - it pretty much killed their site for the 30 minutes

AbbieRose · Post #7 (**permalink**) 12-11-2008, 11:35 PM

Yes, I tried all the very first time I ran a test. I have a good machine-I think that the hold up is server side, as it is not instant for them to produce the shots, especially if a few sites are being tested at the same time.

Anyway it took two hours for a full set of results....