Adobe® has done it again by bringing us Adobe® BrowserLab, the fastest and easiest way to do cross browser testing in one place – inside your browser.
With Adobe® BrowserLab you can literally see your website in ALL leading browsers and even different operating systems that show their different screen rendering. What’s even more amazing is that you can customise your settings and have your website displaying on multiple browsers next to each other in one browser window.
It’s so easy to use, type in the URL that you want to test, select what browser you would like to see it in and the magic hapens. The list of browsers are pretty amazing too (at the time of this post):
- Firefox 2.0 – Windows XP
- Firefox 3.0 – Windows XP
- Firefox 3.5 – Windows XP
- Internet Explorer 6.0 – Windows XP
- Internet Explorer 7.0 – Windows XP
- Internet Explorer 8.0 – Windows XP
- Chrome 3.0 – Windows XP
- Safari 3.0 – OS X
- Safari 4.0 – OS X
- Firefox 2.0 – OS X
- Firefox 3.0 – OS X
- Firefox 3.5 – OS X
All you need to use this service is an Adobe ID or register if you don’t have one. And did I mention when you right-click the little menu pops up…ahhh yes…Flash 
Here are some screenshots while I was testing my site on it:
The browsers firing up one by one
What the website looks like in Firefox 3.0 – Windows XP
Testing multiple browsers at a time side by side
Wow, look at all the browsers at your disposal
Website: http://browserlab.adobe.com/
Very Cool – only concern for me here is bandwidth (as it is constantly transferring data while the app is open) and the fact that you cannot interact with site – but still very useful.
Very helpful! specially when you’re working on a mac and prefers not to open your crappy PC only for testing pages!
Thank you so much!!
Nice, but they still do not support Opera and cannot test local, i.e. your PC filesystem or corporate intranet, web site under development. We do – http://www.browserseal.com
Adobe’s screengrab testing is cool and fast. It still doesn’t help test any of your flash, javascript etc. Check out http://spoon.net/browsers or better yet http://www.multibrowserviewer.com both allow you to run sandboxed browsers like IE 6, with spoon you have to run the browsers over the internet though, which can be slow.
Very useful tool. The obvious problem of no interaction is apparent, but maybe they’ll add this functionality at a later date.
I have noticed that they seem to cache the pages so changes may not be immediately viewable, but it’s still better than having to run your own virtual machines with each version of IE or FF available, this makes developing on a mac a little bit easier and gives me another reason to like Adobe.
Thanks for the article.