Adobe BrowserLab — in the footsteps of BrowserCam and BrowserShots
For years, developers who needed to ensure their sites worked in a broad range of browsers had a couple of choices.
First was to run numerous browsers (and likely operating systems) for testing. Far from fun.
Some year ago, BrowserCam started making life much more pleasant, by offering this service over the web. Over time it has become a very sophisticated service that enables testing of interactive applications, and on mobile devices.
In its footsteps came BrowserShots, a free alternative.
Now Adobe enters the fray, with BrowserLab, which
provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand.
It’s still in limited release, but something you might well consider investigating.
Here’s also looking forward to the day when, at least for desktop browsers, we’ve no need for such services. In the meantime, they can be very handy.
I think that Adobe entering this market is a great thing. As a bigger company, even when they decide to make this service a payed one, they’ll be able to keep subscription costs lower than BrowserCam’s. I can’t wait for them to get more browsers we can test our designs on.
You may want to take a look at this new service http://www.browserseal.com
Since it is not a web service, but an application there is no need to wait at all and the interface is much more convenient. The downside is that it’s a new service which is currently in a very early beta stage and only a handful of browsers are supported.
At any rate, I thinks this new service is worth keeping an eye on, as it is being actively developed and new features as well as new browsers will be added in the future.
Browserlab rules! Although you only get screenshots, it’s way better and faster than BrowserShots (which only shows the top part of the page; and can take a half hour… while browserlab gives you the entire page within a few seconds).
Btw, there’s software called ‘MultipleIEs’ for web designers that enables you to load several versions of IE (IE 3 – 6) on a pc and run them all at the same time… I have WinXP Pro sandboxed (VPC 7) on my Leopard G4 Powerbook… I load up IE7 and run IE6 Multiple at the same time. I tried using IE8, but there’s a bug preventing that… so for me Browserlab solves that. IE8 renders fonts way better than previous IEs, and also paragraph spaces are properly rendered now.
BTW, ‘MultipleIEs’ is the real deal… actual working versions, not screenshots… and it’s free.