Recommended crossbrowser testing solution

Question

Hi,

When developing for the web, one of the saddest issue might be crossbrowser testing. Is there a great solution for testing both on IE6, IE7, IE8, Chrome, Safari and Firefox ?

I tried some web-based solutions but it's not really usable when working offline.

Thx

Boris

Answer 1

Adobe has great tool for that. https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html

it supports: IE6, IE7, IE8, FireFox 3.0, FireFox 3.6, FireFox 2.0, Safari 4.0, Chrome 3.0

Answer 2

I use this tool for testing all of the IE variations. Not sure on whether something like this exists for the other browsers.

Answer 3

http://www.litmusapp.com <- if you fancy paying

http://www.browsershots.org <- if you don't ;)

Apologies, I didn't realise you said "offline" (these are good sites anyway)

Answer 4

I haven't tried this yet, but it looks fairly decent: SuperPreview from Microsoft

Answer 5

I would also suggest IETester for testing multiple IE versions at once. This doesn't cover everything but would probably suffice for initial testing (along with your main browser of choice - which I assume isn't IE).

The problem when you get to do your proper testing is you need to test things on their actual operating systems. The same versions of Firefox on OSX and Firefox on Linux can look quite different because they use different font renderers. If something depended on a font being an exact size, this could break things.

So unless you want to build your own render-farm (not as hard as it sounds actually, nor that expensive if you use some virtualisation tech like VirtualBox or VMWare), you're left with doing it online. BrowserShots is good but you do have to pay if you want your shots back quickly. Adobe BrowserLab doesn't offer quite as many options and I'm not sure what the pricing structure is... But it does integrate quite well into an Adobe workflow.

Answer 6

Microsoft offer a few virtual PC images for testing IE 6, 7 and 8 on Vista and XP.

You can also install legacy versions of other browsers into the images.

Answer 7

Check out the Multi Browser Viewer. It has a great number of standalone browsers with it, including all versions of IE and this means that you can test online and offline websites. I use it and it's saved me from having 4 computers in my office with different versions of IE or having three or four Virtual Machines with IE.

Hope it helps :)

Answer 8

hey you can find these link to get cross browser solution. find these link cross browser solution and smashing magazine cross browser solution and net tuts solution for IE6, IE7, IE8

there are more solution about these.

Answer 9

You should try the triple engine browser (gecko/webkit/trident) lunascape.

Answer 10

The best offline cross browser testing tool is BrowserSeal. It is an application, not web service, to so will work with both company Intranet sites and web pages on your hard disk. It is more than just a screenshot tool as it comes with standalone versions of many browsers allowing you to troubleshoot the issue once a rendering inconsistency is found.

Answer 11

I would be very wary of some of the tools supposedly claiming multiple compatibiity. I used IETester for a while only to find that a customer reported an error on IE6 that didn't show in IETester. installing the real browser on a VM showed the issue. So even though they are very good for visually checking; use with caution.

In the last few years I've experimenting with loads of tools but I keep coming back to virtual machines running a combination of browsers.

Rob..

Answer 12

IETester is what I use

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.