Adobe today is releasing a free preview of BrowserLab on a first-come, first-served basis. It will allow you to test your Web pages in various browsers on different operating systems. Right now there aren't a huge number of browsers: Firefox 2 and 3 for XP and OSX, IE 6 and 7 (XP), and Safari 3 (OSX), but they say that they will be adding more as time goes on and people say they want them. Put me on the list as wanting Internet Explorer 8. :-)
Some of the features I'm excited about include:
- It's fast - I did some tests on several pages and the results came back quickly
- It has integration right inside Dreamweaver (with an extension)
- Onion skinning - you can overlay two different browsers on top of one another to really see how they display differently. I can tell you this will cause almost as many headaches for me as it solves, as it'll encourage my inner anal-person. :-)
- zooming - zoom in on a section of the page to really identify exactly what the problem is
To use BrowserLab in a Web browser, you must have a Flash 10 enabled Web browser, such as Internet Explorer 6 or 7 (probably 8 too, but I didn't try with that browser), Firefox 3, or Safari 3.1. Opera 9 would probably work too, but I didn't test with it.
Check out BrowserLab by going to http://browserlab.adobe.com/ and signing up with your Adobe.com account. What are you waiting for?
thats a very nice tool and it is very useful to us.
It it… But should we rely on such a tool?
I definately use virtual systems for that.
I’ve found Final Builds “IECollection” very helpful. They have IE 1-8 that work without having to install anything and you don’t have to have flash or any of that. You can install all or some.
Manuel: The advantage of a tool like BrowserLab over a virtual system is that it’s going to be more accurate. While there shouldn’t be a difference between Windows running in a virtualized window on a Mac and running natively on a PC, oftentimes there are differences. And if you’re trying to get precise fixes to Web pages, this can be annoying at best.
Versak: Just to clarify, what Adobe told me was that if your browser could run Flash 10 it could run BrowserLab. I’m not sure whether Flash is actually a requirement, that was just a shorthand way of writing the system requirements.
I’m really giving it a try. Otherwise, I’m also checking out the MSIE standalone versions. I’m such a maniac that I take care to optimize for MSIE 5 and 5.5, when possible of course. And I’m curious what MSIE 1 would look like and do.
P.S. Actually they are full right now. It’s kind of weird – their 100% flash site looks like a standard XHTML+CSS implementation. Except for the scrollbars. And lack of context menus.
Jennifer- thanks for the kind words! Your suspicion is correct, however- Flash 10 in your browser of choice is the only requirement (but it’s pretty ubiquitous at this point).
@Alexander- as we build out the service over time the reasons for using Flash 10 will become pretty apparent, if not already in features of the app like the onionskin mode/etc. And yes, we are full at the moment with the preview- the initial rush was incredible but we weathered the load easily and will be opening up the preview much wider in the coming weeks over a few stages (sorry to those who couldn’t get in already)!
@Manuel- virtual systems have their obvious benefits (truly live testing, deep debugging support, etc), but they carry their own overhead in maintenance and time as well. We’re just focusing on a simple, fast solution with BrowserLab.
(I’m finding I use both, quite frankly. Fast, lightweight access to previews during the day-to-day design/markup/css/JS stages of projects via BrowserLab, complex debugging as needed with a dedicated VM. Why not?)
-Scott Fegette
(Adobe BrowserLab Product Manager)