(this post refers to the Web Development Matrix - E6,F6)
Although IE8's promise to stick to web-standards is a big step in the right direction, testing how a new website or web application looks and behaves on different browsers is still a must for every web developer. But how do you do this? With several major players in the browser market (Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Google, ...), an astonishing number of old versions still being in use and different possible operating systems, the task is far from easy.
Luckily, there are some tools available that can lighten the work. These tools come in two different flavours: page testing tools testing one page of your website at the time, and live website testing tools, allowing you to browse through your entire website using a selected browser(version). Apart from the one versus many pages approach, there's another big difference: page testing tools take a screenshot from your page as it would look when visited using a specific browser, meaning that no page interaction can be tested. So if you want to test if your form still works in Internet Explorer on a Mac, or if your AJAX code behaves nicely in Firefox on a PC, you will need a live website testing tool.
I find page testing tools especially handy for running a quick test using a couple of sample pages. A page test doesn't take too much time, and leaves you with a couple of nice screenshots you can send to your client. In addition, a live website test is the only way of making sure the website is fully compliant indeed.
Below you can find an overview of both page testing and live testing tools. My personal favourites? BrowserShots for page testing and BrowserCam for live testing.
In this test:
page testing tools: BrowserCam, BrowserShots, Browserama, Litmus, Browser Photo, IE Netrenderer
live website testing tools: BrowserCam, Cross Browser Testing, IETester
Tip: Before you begin testing, try to define the top browsers, versions and platforms for the website. This could help speeding up the process. Most web analytics packages today offer this kind of information.
