Whilst working on some improvements to Rent a Gite in France, I decided to check that the changes I’d made the the theme I was using hadn’t broken anything in the various browsers, and I did this using a free tool called Browser Shots.
This tool is invaluable to website designers as it allows you to check how your website design renders on the various browsers without having to actually install them all.
This is important as not all browsers are the same: IE7 renders websites in a completely different manner to (the much hated by web designers) IE6, and even Chrome, Firefox and Safari have their differences. If you only test on 1 browser, you might be oblivious to a minor issue which is making your website unreadable on 70% of the internet population’s computers. I’ve particularly found this to be the case for ‘DIY’ websites I’m asked to look at, especially those created with cheap / free software.
So if you want to see how the rest of the world sees your site, head over to Browser Shots, submit your URL, and then review the screenshots you’re provided.
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
2 Comments
Top tip, thanks, I’ll give it a whirl.
I’ve been trying out the new Microsoft IE8 browser today to check that my site was compatible (which I’m delighted to see it is). Microsoft have handily posted a set of Virtual Hard Disk images for different versions of Windows and Internet Explorer so you can trial your site on IE6, IE7, IE8, Vista, etc.
They take ages to download and I noticed that the XP IE8 image only includes Flash v6 (so the Pictobrowser on my site doesn’t work), but otherwise they work fine.
See http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en
Cheers, Geoffrey
nice, thanks for the link Geoffrey. IE tends to be the main culprit in terms of poor rendering, so they OWE us a half decent testing tool (although i’m backing away from a 400MB download!!).