Nitty bitty tip of the week (or month): browsershots.org
Well how many times dint it happen that we the designers and/or developers had to test our work on different browsers for cross browser compatibility issues. It could be difficult to do so since there are quite a lot of them in different forms and versions. People still use IE6 and some nut cases have already migrated to IE8. Firefox releases a new version every other day and some grand pas’ still want to use netscape 4. Not to forget Safari. Like I said it could be difficult to test out on all these 50+ browsers.
Come in browsershots.org. A neat online tool that shows you how exactly your site looks in more than 50 web browsers with or without flash, javascript, activx, etc. You can also set the resolution of the screen you’d like to view. The premium account at browsershots.org costs about $30 a month but there is free access to guest if they can wait for 30 mins for processing the shot. The guest access could get litre annoying as you are required to extend the timer every 30 mind if you have multiple shots to view.
All in all a nitty bitty pinky tinky tool to capture those boring shots and cry about fixing the never ending cross browser compatibility issues.
A tip for clients: Use browser shots to annoy your developers on cross browser issues. Designers and developers always loose their minds when it comes to cross browser compatibility.
Update: Screw browsershots.org. Use FireFox and get this addon. You can add a lot of browsers to it. Just follow these steps:
To add more than 50 user agents, download http://techpatterns.com/downloads/firefox/useragentswitcher.xml and select “import”! (without the override option!) by Hellman658
