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We all know that we should test our websites once we’ve developed them, and that we should test them in multiple different browers, but how easy is it to actually do this?  I have Firefox 3.0, IE6 and IE7 at my disposal, and I could probably install Flock and Safari, but what about SeaMonkey running under FreeBSD, or what about running on a Mac platform??? 

There comes a point where most of us just say “it works for me” and make our sites available to an unsuspecting Internet, but wouldn’t it be far better (not to mention more professional) to test our lovingly developed sites on as many platforms as possible?

Well, it’s surprisingly simple to do that!

The most comprehensive solution is to use is Browsercam, but this costs money!  However, it does provide you with the opportunity to run a huge variety of browsers on their native operating systems which is the ultimate goal for the most thorough testing.

In my opinion though, we’re all better off using Browsershots which is a free service that runs your site against a huge variety of browsers on various platforms and returns a screenshot showing your homepage.  In most instances, this is sufficient to make sure that your site is rendering cleanly for the various platforms that you choose to target.

For example, I now know that this blog displays well on Opera 9.52 on FreeBSD 7.0:

but I can see that the Dillo 0.8.6 browser running under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS OS has a problem with my CSS:

All in all, I can’t recommend this service highly enough!  I would recommend anyone who has their own site to consider using Browsershots to test all their sites.  You know you want to…!