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

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 10:28 pm and is filed under browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.