I just discovered a new service from Adobe regarding website development and design. For those of you that are into this, you all know what a hastle it can be to make a plain HTML and CSS website look fine on all the different platforms and all the different operating systems. Internet Explorer is definitely the biggest concern, since most people are still using this. And they even use older versions like the much hated 6.0.
So, to be sure your website is displayed correctly on Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE, Chrome, … you’d have to test all of them, even in different versions, and potentially write some extra CSS for a specific browser. I’m not saying this has come to an end now, but now the testing part has just become a little bit easier. On https://browserlab.adobe.com/index.htm there is now a cross-platform, cross-browser testing tool available. Just create an account if you don’t already have an Adobe account, log in, type the URL you want to test and select the browsers you want to test it on. Browser engines are loaded and you can even display 2 different versions at the same time, so the differences are easier to spot. So for example you can view a website in both Internet Explorer 7 on Windows and Safari on OS X to see if they are displayed the same.
I’m not saying this is some kind of Holy Grail, but for those that don’t have a Mac available or don’t want to install an bunch of browsers or browsertools (like multiple IE), this could be very helpfull. I haven’t tested it thoroughly, so I hope the behaviour is exactly the same as the real browser. With the current site I’m working on, I’ll definitely be testing this tool against the actual browser and platforms.
