Browser Testing with Adobe BrowserLab

Cross browser testing is one of the hardest challenges for a Web Developer especially when it comes to IE. Why does Microsoft not have browser upgrades like Safari and Firefox? Life would have been much easier.

Developers have been doing Browser Testing using a lot of different ways, like using BrowsrCamp, or installing Parallels if they are working on a Mac to test for IE or running virtual machines with XP on Macs , or standalone versions of IE which don't always give a very accurate rendering of a website.

Recently i came across Adobe Browser Lab which is a web based service that essentially allows you to enter a URL which it then takes a screen capture of in many different browsers. It’s quite fast, it’s extremely handy and, for the time being at least, it’s free. You simply need to register with Adobe and you will be able to use BrowserLab.

The advantage of Browser Lab is that it provides browser testing for different browsers on different operating systems. You can do side by side comparisons and you can also select a default set of browsers you want to always test for.

BrowserLab seems to have all the latest versions of the modern Browsers. You can also overlay screenshots of different browser output and adjust transparency to check for differences.

The only drawback is that you can't interact with the content. But it's still very useful as it saves a lot of hassle and minimise the number of resources i need to use to do such simple tasks.