When Browsers Attack, Head to the BrowserLab
Today is a historic day in the world of web design and development because our jobs just got a lot easier with the preview release of BrowserLab, a future web-based service from Adobe, now available on Adobe Labs. BrowserLab takes the drudgery out of finding the bugs and differences in your pages between the different browsers and browser versions.
Of course, the idea of a service like this is not new – but BrowserLab offers a unique feature called “onion skin view”, which allows you to overlay the view from the selected browsers on top of each other. This way it’s easy to see the differences between the browser renderings. And if you are a Dreamweaver CS4 user, it gets even better – there is a new extension which will add BrowserLab to your Preview in Browser list. This means that you don’t even have to upload your pages to your site to have BrowserLab show you “what’s up”.
No, you’re not seeing double – oh, wait… you ARE seeing double!
In fact, I’ve been using BrowserLab quite a bit and it even helped me discover a “bug” right here in my blog when it was viewed in Internet Explorer 6 (and no, you can’t see it – because I fixed it immediately). As a Mac user, I keep VMWare running all the time (our corporate email is run off of an Exchange server, if you must know) and that means that I have IE available – but only as IE 8. And the idea of firing up another instance just to check IE 6 pains me to no end. So, of course, BrowserLab has got me (virtually) jumping up and down! I hope you’ll find it as usual as I already have. And be sure to post your comments and suggestions – afterall, that’s the reason that we put this stuff out there early. We want your feedback!
June 8th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I wish I had this and DWCS4 6 months ago, and my hourly wage would’ve turned out to be much higher than it was in a tricky project I worked on back then.
The works done by you and Stephanie Sullivan (Adobe TV clips, books, blog comments, etc.) have definitely inspired me to take a close look at Adobe CS4 Web Premium, which I eventually bought and have been very happy with the productivity gain/ROI it provides. Thank you guys and keep up with good works!!
October 30th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Please check http://www.browserseal.com/ – although it supports less browsers, it can easily beat BrowserLab in terms of speed.
December 17th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Hey, thanks for “checking out the competition” as I noticed the site you are suggesting is yours! Obviously, you also realize that our BrowserLab is still in development. We’re constantly adding features and functionality based upon the user feedback that we are getting, as well as working to improve rendering speeds.