Have you ever wanted to test a newly developed site in a bunch of different browsers but didn’t have four or five spare computers with various OSs and browser versions laying around? Well, browsershots.org might be the solution to your problem.
Just go to the site, enter your site’s URL, then select the browsers you want to test in. Currently supported browsers are:
- IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 7, and Firefox 2.0 for Windows
- Firefox 2.0 and Safari 2.0 for Mac
- A ton of browsers/versions for Linux
Then, choose your other options such as screen resolution, Javascript enabled/disabled and version, Java installed/not installed and version, Flash installed/not installed and version, color depth, media plugins, and the maximum time you are willing to wait for your screen shots. That’s all there is to it.
One dissapointing aspect of the site is that it is pretty slow to produce any results. I queued up a request for this site for IE 7 and set my maximum wait time to 30 minutes with all of the rest of the criteria set to “Don’t Care”. It ended up timing out of the queue before actually giving me anything. Hopefully the creator is working on speeding this up, because I don’t think there are too many instances where someone will want to wait 4 hours (the maximum wait time) to see a screen shot. The good thing is that the site caches recent requests, so if a screen shot has been recently taken, you don’t have to wait again. To see this in action, request a screen shot for microsoft.com or another popular site.
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