Comments on: Alkaline by Litmus: Windows Browser Testing for Mac Users

By: raena

raena — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:22:17 +0000

It’s really nice not to have to virtualise an entire operating system just to see what one little thing looks like in one browser. But if you have a spare PC it is a piece of cake to install a couple of VMs and just use Remote Desktop to connect over there.

Generally the stuff I do is more complex than just ‘does it look ok’; I also need to see the behaviour. For email, though, this looks like it could be pretty good.

By: 27stars

27stars — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:53:04 +0000

I agree with brothercake! My general practice is to build in Firefox and then debug for IE7 and IE6 (though bring on the day IE6 can be happily forgotten about…) and there are things you just can’t test with screenshots! navigation and javascript for two – and the speed of being able to make changes and then test immediately suits me too.
I can see the advantages of being able to present a report to your clients with the screenshots as assurance of cross browser compatibility, but I don’t see any practical use during development, and if depended upon could lead to some unpleasant surprises!

By: brothercake

brothercake — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:50:44 +0000

The trouble with services like this is that it’s verging-on impossible to make incremental changes. You know – you take a screenshot, see something’s wrong, edit some CSS, take another screenshot, make another change … it will take hours to do what you could do in a few minute if you actually had the test environment available.

For a professional developer I think it’s basically pretty slack to not have development environments available – things like VMWare – that you can use to do cross-browser testing.

By: Dan Romanchik

Dan Romanchik — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:59:11 +0000

I like the concept, but it’s way too expensive. For testing IE6 compatibility, I bought an old laptop with IE6 installed for only $200. This might be affordable for a big shop doing lots of development, but for freelancers it’s much cheaper to go the route that I did.

By: aemciv

aemciv — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:33:55 +0000

@W2ttsy well said

By: John

John — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:37:12 +0000

Crossbrowsertesting.com is a great way to go.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:35:03 +0000

There are better options. This is limited since IE6 still forms a big user base – there should be more browser version options. And the price also seems quite high.

By: W2ttsy

W2ttsy — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:37:06 +0000

a single VM running XP and IE Tester (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage) will also work well on a mac. alot better than running several VMs or relying on screen shot style debugging

By: kaklz

kaklz — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:11:47 +0000

Will you add it to your cross-browser testing tools?

No, it’s just too slow + I didn’t find a way to navigate around the page I was testing. If your site requires authorization, you’re stuck.