What's it like in IE?

By Michael Baxter on 1 April 2010 with tags Tech

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BrowserLab is a new Adobe web application. The application is free to use and allows you to test any websites layout, in different browsers of different operative systems.

There are other web services out there that help webmasters by taking snapshots of web pages, but BrowserLab's flash interface lets the user interact and compare results in a simpler and better way.

When you first type the address that you want to analyse into the application, BrowserLab will load four images from its default browsers which are Firefox 3 in Windows XP and OS X, Safari in OS X and IE7 in Windows XP. Image loading takes a few moments and within a minute you will get your website showing on the main application window, exactly as Firefox 3 would render it. You can easily switch from one browser to another. You can even choose non-default browsers and in that case BL will snapshot the page with the new requested browser and then, after few more seconds, you will see the freshly generated image.

The platform also offers the possibility to create a personal set of default browsers, which can be used to load them all together without selecting each browser individually. This is not so important right now as only seven combinations of browser/o.s. are available, but it will be useful soon as other platforms will be added.

Utopia recommends reviewing these types of technologies so the websites and applications we all develop can be feature rich and useable by as many people as possible. By using these you can produce better front-end systems.