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http://www.browsercam.com/ offers VNC access to a huge range of OS/browser/plugin combinations.

More expensive than running a few VM, but it does more.

It also strikes me that multiple installed browsers + transparent windows = onion skins, albeit with a clumsy UI.

Or, IDK, get a subscription to http://www.browsercam.com/ or try out the free http://browsershots.org/ ...

Yay, I get to mention this everytime a browser thread comes up.
BrowserCam

Browsercam.

It's a plug, yes. But they deserve it.

can the latter category necessarily afford a $3,000 expense every three years to buy a commodity PC with a newer Windows OS and the newer hardware it requires and a Mac with a newer Mac OS X and the newer hardware it requires?

If all you need to do is test websites, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware. Get a cheap $300 PC. It'll have the latest version of Windows. It won't run nifty games, but it'll handle IE7 fine. Buy a Mac Mini for $600. Get a KVM switch (a one-time expense) so you can share the keyboard, mouse and monitor. Now your expenses are more like $900 every three years.

And if you really don't want to buy new computers, there are sites like BrowserCam, , Browsershots, and iCapture that will at least test layout on other platforms.

http://www.www.browsercam.com/. There's free ones too but I'm to lazy to look them up. Anyway, now you know it already exists. Cheers, Ed

$400 per year? That's more expensive than just buying a new Mac and a new commodity PC every four years.

$400 per year? That's more expensive than just buying a new Mac and a new commodity PC every four years.

Here's a nice tool to use : http://www.browsercam.com/

Check out this service (yes, it costs money):

http://www.browsercam.com/default.aspx

Lets you VNC (or whatever) into a huge bank of machines (virtual or not, I don't know) that allow you to test your pages in every platform/browser combo in the known universe. Pretty cool, I wish I had thought of it.

An "IE preferred" message simply means "tested in IE".

I see your point, but it still seems exclusionary by nature. The inference I take from an "IE preferred" message is that for some reason it doesn't work properly in other browsers. In the absence of an "IE preferred" message, I assume the site works as it should, meaning whichever browser I use, I'll be ok.

... I never test on a Mac. It's simply too small of a segment, and I'm not about to buy a Mac just to test with it.

That depends on the type of site you're maintaining, obviously. I assume you've seen BrowserCam. It's pretty useful, though a bit slow at times. I'm coming from the other end of the spectrum, since I use a Mac to develop websites and don't want to hassle with VirtualPC or buy new hardware just to test sites in Windows. One thing I really like about BrowserCam is that I can test against all kinds of browsers, not just the latest versions of IE.

Also, anyone designing a web site pretty much has to test it with Internet Exploder. Boot Camp is the alternative to wasting desk space for a Dell.

I just can't imagine installing IE7 on my machine except if I REALLY have to to verify that my websites load and operate with it. And that would be really sad.

Check out http://www.browsercam.com/ if you need to know what your website(s) look like in other browsers. It's generally enough to make sure your (x)html folows W3 http://www.w3.org/ standards, but some browsers don't so Browsercam and other tools like it can be of value if you really want to know what your site will look like in other browsers. It's great for Windows users also since it can show Linux-browsers like Konqueror etc also.

BrowserCam has actually evolved beyond its old "here's a screenshot of how your page renders" strategy. You can now, for a fairly reasonable fee (especially if you go the group buy approach), access their systems live via VNC.

Granted, you'll have to deal with the latency of VNC over the Internet, but it is a solution for people who need more interactivity than old-school BrowserCam but don't want to purchase and maintain another system themselves.

...there's already this. It does pretty much exactly what you're looking for, except via VNC.

Hell, there are web based checks that will check against Opera, FireFox, IE of various flavors, Safari, Konqorer and more...

You don't even have to install software!

http://www.browsercam.com/ for a commercial service.

I really only use the Windows system for games and checking my HTML/CSS/JS when I'm doing web design, everything else I do on the Mac.

I use http://browsercam.com/ for testing different CSS-layouts. It's not perfect, but trial version is free for 24 hours... ;)

How about BrowserCam?

Or use BrowserCam. For a small fee, they will provide screenshots of your site from all the major browsers on demand.

I don't think there are any decent Mac emulators around. There are, however, decent PC emulators on the Mac.

If that's not an option, then you can't really do anything about Mac/IE, as the Mac and Windows Internet Explorers use completely different rendering engines.

Safari is based around the KHTML engine, and so you can be fairly safe with that browser as long as you test in Konqueror.

Things like Browsercam aren't very helpful, as you can't interact with them, and a lot of bugs only show up when interaction takes place. But if you have no other option, like Mac/IE without owning a Mac, then it's better than nothing.

Even if you aren't bothered about other platforms, virtual machines like VMWare are useful. You can set up a range of them with different screen resolutions, font size settings, Javascript on and off, and so on, so you don't have to keep fiddling with your settings.

If you take the "fiddle with your settings" approach to testing, set up a second account on your workstation for just this purpose. That way, any plugins, settings, etc, that you use for normal day-to-day surfing won't interfere with your testing. Make sure you keep a checklist where you can tick off each combination of settings that you have tested against - you will miss combinations otherwise. You will probably find it useful to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same machine.

Obviously, run your code through HTML and CSS validators, and possibly linters as well. It's a good idea to incorporate validation into your publishing routine - nothing invalid ever reaches the server. If you can't do that, it's a good idea to set up a validator to automatically spider your websites on a regular basis and report any errors to you via email. Alternatively, check out Ben Hammersely's validation RSS feed.

This is a little time consuming and you can only test one page at a time, but in the absence of Virtual PC or the like (I'm on a Mac) or having all the browsers & platforms you need you can always test them here. I will usually run a page template through this using a free one-day trial account. http://browsercam.com/ I have no connection to the company, I'm just a satisfied leech.

Browsercam is a good resource. Of course, you can't test functionality with it, but your layout is where you will run into the most browser bugs.

Ultimately, the best route I've found is to stick like glue to the standards and don't use nested tables or rely on Javascript.

As long as you stick valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML and CSS, the rendering bugs for IE5+/Win and IE5+/Mac are pretty well known. Older browsers can easily be sent plain text or minimal styling with media or @import hacks. Spend a lot of time lurking on the CSS-d mailing list.

Where do you find out about the "well-known" rendering bugs? There are a ton of sites out there about them, but I like PositionIsEverything and the CSS-Discuss Wiki.

Do a Google search, and you'll find companies, tools and instructions, etc to help you do this if you are unable or unwilling to purchase the required equipment/software to do it yourself.

Of course, half the problem is knowing the correct question to ask. That's why google is so popular - it gets good results with bad questions, and you can refine your question with repeated searches.

-Adam

If you don't want to buy a mac, you could always use browsercam

Of course you messed up in the first place not getting a mac. You can test in PC/IE from the mac, but not the other way around.

Someone more immediately familiar with them them than I am will surely (hint, hint) provide you with some useful URLs.

Browser Cam is one. US$39/month for unlimited use or US$10/hr.

While it's a paid service, Browser Cam looks pretty good. You give them a URL and pick a browser/OS combination; they give you a screenshot of your page rendering on that browser and OS.

It's called Browsercam and here's an example set of screen shots of an old version of Jeffery Zeldman's site. It's not email based but the gist of the service is as you described.

It sounds like an ideal way of testing a site without having every popular platform / browser combination available.

It's called Browsercam and here's an example set of screen shots of an old version of Jeffery Zeldman's site. It's not email based but the gist of the service is as you described.

It sounds like an ideal way of testing a site without having every popular platform / browser combination available.

try the browser cam. CSS-D inhabitants swear by it.

This story's at three comments, and already I'm hearing that "if you just use standards, it'll be OK." That's a load of bull, actually. Standards make the cross-platform problem easier to solve, but there are always differences in interpretation of a spec. Safari has CSS bugs that Mozilla doesn't, and IE's Javascript parser does things differently than Opera's. Standards support helps this situation immensely, but by no means is it a panacea. I'm a big fan of designing sites that validate to XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 (and indeed, all of mine do), but it's still a lot of effort to come up with something that both looks good and works similarly and accessibly across five major browsers and three platforms.

My advice to the poster is to do one of three things:

1. Buy an iBook or Powerbook. They're pretty cheap, lovely to use, and you've got a good excuse for needing one. If your budget doesn't allow, check on eBay for a used G4 system (an eMac, for instance) and grab it instead.
2. Grab the only decent emulator I know of, Basilisk, and try to find someone with an Apple BIOS ROM and some System 7 CDs. That's as close as you'll get to emulating one, and no, it won't run OS X.
3. Use BrowserCam, a service that lets you (for a fee) see the results of your labor in a variety of browsers. It seems pretty cool, if you don't have any other option, but over time just buying a mac will pay for itself anyway.