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browserlab posts

Filed under: Design, Developer, Productivity, Web services, Adobe, Web

Adobe Browserlab open for business

Adobe Browserlab
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


Filed under: Design, Productivity, Adobe, Beta, Browsers

Adobe Browserlab now in limited preview


One of the challenges of web design is making sure your site renders properly in the most popular browsers your visitors use. Sometimes, this means installing an extra browser or two (or ten) on your system, to preview your page in each one. It might even mean running multiple operating systems. Well, Adobe BrowserLab aims to fix all that by generating previews of a page as it would look in several different browsers, across multiple operating systems.

You can view the previews side-by-side to get a direct comparison between Firefox 2 and 3 for Mac or Windows XP, IE 6 and 7 for Windows XP, and Safari 3 for Mac. There's also an Onion Skin mode that allows you to overlay one version on another, with adjustable transparency. Sure, there are some perfectly viable browsers that aren't included, but the most popular players are all there. It will be interesting to see if Adobe expands BrowserLab to reflect the increasing adoption of mobile browsers.

The free preview of BrowserLab is available now, but it's limited and there aren't always slots available. You'll find a "check status" link on the download site to let know whether you can get in.

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