Do you ever take the time to view your web design on the different browsers that are now being used? There is a good chance your site renders well with most, if not all browsers – but how do you know? Internet Explorer is a good example. You can only have one version installed at any one time – which do you have, IE6 or IE8?
If you have several different computers then you can install one version on each and you’re covered. If you don’t then you are going to need to use a third party product. These third party products give you a snapshot as to how well your web design appears on each browser and will show up any problems. Here are a couple of free screenshot sites that you could access:
- Browsershots – http://browsershots.org/ (broad range of browsers covered)
- Browsercam – http://www.browsercam.com/
- Browsercamp – http://www.browsrcamp.com/ (check for Mac compatibility)
- Browserseal – http://www.browserseal.com/ (very fast)
- Net Renderer – http://www.ipinfo.info/netrenderer (for IE5.5 – IE8)
There is one caveat to the use of these sites. They only display a flat shot of your web design. You cannot interact with your site in any way so you can’t test CSS or Java functions at all.
If you wish to test CSS, Java or any other function such as form layout, you will need to load your site into a browser and use the functions. Firefox, IE, Safari and Google Chrome will all run quite happily on the one computer. If you want to test various versions of IE then you will need more than one computer.
Web browsers are always being updated. Firefox has recently been updated to version 3 and Internet Explorer to version 8. If you haven’t tested your recently – now is a good time to do it.
