Easy Cross-Browser Testing
October 27th, 2011 by Matt Haff
One of the most annoying, painful, hair-pulling, time consuming responsibility of a web developer is cross-browser testing. Imagine you’ve spent about 8 hours developing a pixel perfect website in Safari or Firefox (for you PC people) and you’re getting to the task of testing it cross-browser. You get multiple computers, browsers, devices all together and start to pull up your website on each of them… What if it didn’t have to be that way?
I have a couple setups that I use when it comes to testing across multiple platforms & browsers and this is by far the easiest way. Adobe Browser Lab allows you to test 11 browsers at once. Now while it doesn’t allow you to do much interactive testing and debugging it works great for getting a glimpse of your site and observing any design issues.
When it takes more than a quick glimpse then I use Parallels (I use mac) to open up Windows 7 and test across multiple Internet Explorer versions with IETester. I know it’s not the best looking program but it’s accurate for testing IE5.5 – IE9.
How do you test cross-browser?
I'm developing on OS X so finding a convenient way to test variants of Windows / IE is important. For an independent developer, money can be a barrier as well. (Is it feasible to purchase an XP, Vista, and Windows 7 license along with VMWare Fusion or Parallels)?
Luckily there are great free options that tackle this problem.
Sun's open source Virtual Box is a great free alternative to Fusion & Parallels: https://www.virtualbox.org/
Secondly, Microsoft provides free (legal) copies of XP, Vista, and Windows 7 images for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx…
Microsoft explains genuine activation works with these images, their policy on usage, etc. on that download page.
There you go!
Jared
October 28th, 2011