Webgazette.co.uk

I only have access to a Widows XP machine with a limited number of browsers and I suspect many people must be in a similar situation. This can prove to be a bit tricky when designing and coding websites.

For the most part you can help yourself by only using valid markup and avoiding using CSS hacks as far as possible but there are times when things don’t work in a certain browsers. As much as I would like to own different machines to cover all the popular browsers I can’t afford to and I doubt many people can.

While you can’t beat actually being able to use the browsers to preview the website, help is at hand with a number of free services that take a screenshot for you, from a number of different browsers.

Here are 3 that I know about and have used:

BrowsrCamp

BrowsrCamp offer a free screenshot from MacOSX Safari 2.0.4 in various resolutions and image formats. The service is fast and reliable and if you need more they offer live access to a lot more browsers for a fee.

Browsershots.org

Browsershots.org offer a free open source service providing screenshots for a good selection of browsers and operating systems covering MS Windows, Linux and MasOSX covering most of the popular browsers for each platform. The service is good and comprehensive but can be slow as each request is placed in a queue and can take some time to complete at busy times.

IE NetRenderer

IE NetRenderer is another free service offering screenshots from IE 5.5, 6 and 7. They also provide a unique Mixed Overlay and Difference Mode for IE6 and 7 which allows you to instantly see the rendering differences for the two browsers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.