Adobe BrowserLab: test your websites

If you do web site development you’re probably well-acquainted with browser testing*—checking your site in a variety of web browsers to ensure that you know how it’s going to look and behave for the vast majority of users. You especially want to test against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser: it has been one of the worst in terms of rendering consistent with HTML and CSS web standards.

Adobe has a free online tool—BrowserLab—that will let you check your site in a simulated browser session using a wide variety of rendering engines, including IE 6, 7, 8 and 9, various versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox. You can specify Windows or OS X versions and quickly check where you may need to fix some coding errors, or even hack your perfectly-compliant code to accommodate IE’s willful ignorance of basic CSS rules.

BrowserLab is really useful, and seems to give an accurate rendering. I fired up Windows in a virtual machine on OS X and did some testing with the Windows versions of IE 7, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and then checked the results against BrowserLab—the results in Windows looked the same as what I got from BrowserLab, including some ridiculous scrolling issues on Chrome 11. You just need to create an account on the site and log in to use it.

* If you’re not testing against other browsers besides IE on Windows, or whatever development platform you use, give it a try and make sure that your site looks the way you expect it to across different browsers and operating systems. Your users will appreciate it.

Posted: June 3rd, 2011
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Software, Web-based Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »

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