As a few of you might already know: Adobe launched a new online application recently. Called Adobe Browser Lab which lets you test your website on diffrent Browsers on various operating systems. I had a quick look today but it didn’t really impressed me. First of all you can only choose from seven diffrent browser/operating system combination. It is limited to Firefox / Safari / IE on the operating systems Windows XP and Mac. Thats it. No Chrome, no IE8 no Windows Vista. And what about all the older systems? And Linux … and so on and so on. Secondly you get screenshots of your website only, so you can not test all the other behaviours. But it is fast. But thats the only positiv thing about it so far. Lets wait and see, maybe they are extending their service.
There are some other cross browser testing services out there you can choose from:
- http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com - loads of diffrent browser types are support on a lot of operating system. includes IE8, Chrome, on Vista and Windows 7 Beta. you log on to a remote machine and can choose the browser then. for free use there is a session limit of 5 minutes which barley is enough to get the website displayed but in depends on your connection type of course
- BrowserShots - it takes screenshot of your website. A huge amount of Browsers are available.
So whats your opinion on Adobe’s BrowserLab?
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I agree totally, not enough support for different OS and browsers but as you said quite fast. There is nothing (I have found) that has everything that we need so maybe we should not be too harsh. It might as you say, just be a beginning.
Hopefully they will evolve the service to include more options. But then again it mentioned being FREE for a limited time so it might be for naught anyway…
So far we have not (in the office) been able to properly crossbrowser test without atleast a few computers, and we still don’t have a capability to test in Vista. What sane person would by a spare computer and have it standing in the corner for nothing but testing…