Today I changed the options in the Google Chrome Browser to change the location of Google Chrome's downloads. Here's how it's done:

To customise and control Google Chrome, click on the wrench icon in the top right of the Google Chrome Window:

Select "Options" from the drop down menu:

Click on the "Minor Tweaks" tab and browse to the new location where you wish to save the files. You can now set your files to download to a specific location on your PC.

If you want to go a step further there's a check box that allows you to "Ask where to save each file before downloading". I found this handy as it lets you organise any files immediately instead of storing everything in a central location.

You'll see back over the last week that I've launched a couple of new sites, lucky.ie and topcommentator.com. When getting the sites up and running I was looking at them in different browsers to make sure they looked ok. I still have IE6 installed on my machine, for whatever reason I don't know why!

photo credit: sporras

Anyway, I had a good look at both sites in IE6, topcommentator.com looks fine but lucky.ie is way of the mark, I wont bother a screenshot, it's best just to go and have a look yourself. I could try and address this but there's since been an IE7 and IE8 released, IE6 should really be made dormant at this stage. There is some code you can place in your website to give a warning to update if you're still running IE6 so I may look at installing that on lucky.ie in the future. Looking round at sites in different browsers it's hard to argue against the functional offered by Firefox but if you're looking for a real clean look it has to be Google Chrome for me. Google should buy Mozilla and tie up the browser market. They should also partner up with PC manufacturers and and try to get the new Chrome OS installed on new PCs. I'm sure they are doing this already and if they do this they could really tie up the PC/Web market. That might not be the best thing in the world for competition but that's what I'd be thinking about doing if I was Google.

Earlier in the week I mentioned that I'd installed Google Chrome on my machine to see how my blog looked using the chrome browser. It's nice to have a quick look at any changes you make to your site by installing all of the major browsers, but if you want to have a look at how your site looks across multiple browsers then the easiest solution I've found is browsershots. Here's what browsershots does...

What is Browsershots?
Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

I don't have time to track all of the changes I make across multiple browsers. Since the majority of hits on this site come from Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari, if this site looks good in those four, then I'm pretty happy. However, it's still worth having a look at how your site looks in other browsers just incase there's any majors issues. Browsershots is open source too, so I'm sure you can play about with it yourself and customise it to look at your pages across a preset list of browser/os combinations.

When using browsershots, it's just a matter of selecting whatever combination of operating systems and browsers you like and then waiting on the screenshots. You may need to extend the amount of time that browsershots runs for. The default time limit is thirty minutes, by pressing the extend button you extend to start at 30 minutes again, so just keep an eye on the progress until all screenshots are complete. When eveything finishes, you'll see what the screenshots look like within the browsershots website and they are also available for download as a zip file.

Here's a list of all browsers suported for Linux, Windows, Mac and BSD operating systems:

Linux:
Dillo 0.8, Dillo 2.0, Epiphany 2.22, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, Galeon 2.0, Iceape 1.1, Iceweasel 2.0, Iceweasel 3.0, Kazehakase 0.5, Konqueror 3.5, Konqueror 4.2, Minefield 3.2, Minefield 3.6, Navigator 9.0, Opera 10.0, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.62, Opera 9.63, Opera 9.64, SeaMonkey 1.1, SeaMonkey 2.0, Shiretoko 3.1, Shiretoko 3.5

Windows:
Avant 11.7, Chrome 0.2, Chrome 0.3, Chrome 0.4, Chrome 1.0, Chrome 2.0, Firefox 0.8, Firefox 0.9, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, Flock 2.5, K-Meleon 1.1, K-Meleon 1.5, Minefield 3.2, Minefield 3.6, MSIE 3.0, MSIE 4.0, MSIE 5.0, MSIE 5.1, MSIE 5.5, MSIE 6.0, MSIE 7.0, MSIE 8.0, Navigator 8.1, Navigator 9.0, Opera 0.27, Opera 10.0, Opera 7.0, Opera 7.11, Opera 7.54, Opera 8.0, Opera 8.53, Opera 8.54, Opera 9.25, Opera 9.26, Opera 9.27, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.51, Opera 9.52, Opera 9.60, Opera 9.61, Opera 9.62, Opera 9.63, Opera 9.64, Safari 3.0, Safari 3.2, Safari 4.0, SeaMonkey 1.1, SeaMonkey 2.0, Shiretoko 3.1, Shiretoko 3.5

Mac:
Firefox 3.0, Safari 3.2, Safari 4.0

BSD
Dillo 2.0, Epiphany 2.22, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.1, Galeon 2.0, Kazehakase 0.5, SeaMonkey 1.1