Filed under: Design, Developer, Productivity, Web services, Adobe, Web
Adobe Browserlab open for business
Several months ago Jay pointed to Browserlab, a very useful new service for Web developers from Adobe. Browserlab allows you to view a Web page in multiple versions of most of the latest browsers. Since cross browser testing is perhaps the most painful part of Web development, any service that aids in this task is very welcome. The service is now accepting new users, and is very cool.
The flash-based tool will render a page in recent versions of the most used browsers, and will let you view an image of the rendered page one at a time, side by side (2-up view) or my personal favorite, onion skin view, which stacks two images from two different browsers on top of each other and gives you a slider to adjust translucency back and forth so you can see just how horribly Internet Explorer renders your page elements relative to every other modern browser.
The service is currently free and I expect that I will be using it quite heavily.
At the time of writing, the supported browsers are:
- Firefox 2.0 - Windows XP - version 2.0.0.18
- Firefox 3.0 - Windows XP - version 3.0.4
- Internet Explorer 6.0 - Windows XP - version 6.0.3790.3959
- Internet Explorer 7.0 - Windows XP - version 7.0.5730
- Internet Explorer 8.0 - Windows XP - version 8.0.6001.18702
- Safari 3.0 - OS X - version 3.2.3
- Safari 4.0 - OS X - version 4.0.3
- Firefox 2.0 - OS X - version 2.0.0.18
- Firefox 3.0 - OS X - version 3.0.4
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dafrety said 1:25PM on 10-21-2009
It would be nice if they didn't force you to get an account. I'm less of a web developer and more a person who wants to see how horribly IE 6 renders his favorite websites.
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Evenio said 1:41PM on 10-21-2009
http://browsershots.org/ is a free service that's been out for a while that serves a similar purpose and doesn't require an account, although it doesn't offer some of the cooler stuff like onion-skinning.
Erik Sagen said 2:26PM on 10-21-2009
I can honestly say this is a lot faster than Browsershots. Only took about 1-2 minutes to render 4-5 versions, which you can click between (depending on browser selected).
Onion skinning isn't as useful to me, but the side-by-side view is pretty neat.
In most cases I'd be using this to see if my site looks okay in IE6.
Matt S. said 2:30PM on 10-21-2009
It actually took Adobe longer than I thought it would to knock off Microsoft Expression Web's SuperPreview and Im glad to see they half assed it by making it out of flash and not a full fledged app.
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Scott Fegette said 4:23PM on 10-29-2009
Matt- for the record, we demoed BrowserLab (under it's codename Meer Meer) at MAX 2008 months before MS SuperPreview, so it's actually the other way around. The Expression team was present for that demo as well, and clearly taking notes - met several of 'em at the event in fact. ;-)
And also for the record, BrowserLab is a service-based application specifically to get around many of the issues/limitations of a native desktop app. If you're a Windows-centric developer SuperPreview will certainly serve it's purpose - until you need to test across platforms of course.
-Scott, Adobe Systems
Anthony said 4:21PM on 10-21-2009
Most latest browsers? Really?
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Matt Heerema said 4:54PM on 10-21-2009
*Facepalm*. Thanks. Fixing now.
Ken said 7:08AM on 10-22-2009
If you need more than a screenshot and actually need to use your site in a particular browser or OS to make sure javascript or interactive elements such as rollovers or ajax effects work properly, give crossbrowsertesting.com a try. It provides both the initial screening that Browserlab does by taking screenshots and the ability to actually use a desired browser live via vnc.
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Scott Fegette said 4:26PM on 10-29-2009
@Ken- if you use Dreamweaver you can interact with any active page in DW CS4's Live View, freeze the state of the page/DOM at any point, and send that 'page state' directly to BrowserLab. That covers any Ajax-delivered data from the back end, and JS interface states easily. We're considering opening up an API to allow other dev/design tools to do this with BrowserLab too, so if that's something you're interested in (if you're not using DW CS4), let us know?
Jan said 5:45AM on 10-23-2009
I need to see FF IE and Safari versions 10times per minute when I'm finishing a site so I need all those versions and a virtual machine with other versions anyway. This just isn't enough when you're doing any ajax stuff.
It would be cool though if they made it a desktop app which would actually render the page inside it and give me basically all browsers in one app, transparent one over the other... now that I would pay for :)
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Vasya said 3:55AM on 11-01-2009
Please check http://www.browserseal.com/ - although it supports less browsers, it can easily beat BrowserLab in terms of speed.
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