How can I test my site across multiple browsers and browser versions?

Get Started
1

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me any good sites or applications for testing my design across multiple browsers and their various browser versions?

Thanks

Kyle

2

What I do is I have all the major browsers (FireFox, Opera, ie, Safari, etc) but you can also pick up MultiIE or some of the other ‘version variants’ of iE. This gives me ability to check sites from ie5 to ie8 and all the other browsers in between. This has served me well over the years but does get redundant switching from 7 different browsers when looking for errors.

Hope that helps some.

3

Hi NCMW,

yeah currently I have IE6 - IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera but what I want to be able to check most importantly is various versions of Firefox, Safari…?

4

I knew of a way to have different FF versions but you will have to search around for that. It involved making different profiles, linked to different installs. Ended up being kind of useless overall though because both FF and Safari tend to ‘force’ your update version. From what you listed however, I would say you have most of the bases covered. An older version of Safari may only have a small percentage of users.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

As you can see, ie users are going down monthly but FF and Chrome are increasing. My research tells me by 2011, Chrome should have more daily users than iE and anyone who has had to debug iE knows how great of news this is.

:smiley:

5

You could use Adobe’s browser lab. One of it’s best features is the Onion Skin feature that let’s you overlay different browser views to see the differences.

https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html

6

Thanks guys!

7

You could also try http://browsershots.org/

It’s free and will deliver you a snap shot (an image file) of a specific page in various versions of dozens of browsers across different platforms.

8

Instead of relying on screenshots, you can install each version in a dir on your computer.

For Win: http://oldapps.com/old_version_list_web_browser.php

Mac: http://mac.oldapps.com/browsers.php

9

You can also use VMWare/VirtualPC/VirtualBox to create virtual images and install various browsers in them…this way they won’t “clutter” your system