Browsershots – Online Web Design Testing in Different Browsers

This article is for web designers here. I recommend this articles to all bloggers as well. Many bloggers go for free third-party themes which may not follow standards all the time, so you can check if theme you are using is working fine in all major browsers.

Reason for highlighting major in above line is, no matter which theme you choose or code, it will not render properly in decade old browsers unless you are writing plain old HTML without any CSS or JavaScript.

As a (good) habit, I used to test any of my web design from Firefox 2/3, Internet Explorer 6/7, Safari 3.1, Opera 9.5 and Google Chrome. These browsers make most of the browser market share, so we can safely assume that our web design will render well from most of the browsers.

Now those who want to be sure about it, such for corporate projects or working on a platform where you can not install all famous browsers, like IE 6 and above on Mac, you can use Browsershots.

At Browsershots, you just need to specify URL of a webpage and select list of browsers. They have around 70+ browsers in total to select from and you can select them all if you are serious about your design.

I personally select only browsers which are important as larger list often take time upto 2/3 hours to process. You can download all screenshots captured by Browsershots at once or view them online as well.

Downloading is recommended as they do not store them on their server for long time. This service is free and so it has limitations. You can capture around 100 screenshots only per day per site. Paid users get higher limit as well as more priority which means they don’t have to wait for hours to get their capturing job done.

Browsershots is a good service but you can not test many things like JavaScript effects, tabbed navigation using it. So use Browsershots alongwith few top browsers on your desktop to test your web design perfectly.

Links: Browsershots | Top 10 Browsers