Generally, cross browser testing is a huge pain for all parties concerned, because of the variability involved in testing a website to ensure clean compatibility among innumerable browser and operating system configurations. Making a site IE6 compatible is every developer’s ultimate adversary, but luckily Google has released Chrome Frame to handily solve that annoying problem while IE6 market share slowly dwindles before becoming completely irrelevant in the near future.
Basic and free services like BrowserShots are a great starting point, as they cover a wide variety of different versions of web browsers and are very easy to use. This preview of Browsershots shows versions of all browsers they will test, with the most popular versions highlighted automatically.
More sophisticated testing apps are needed in most cases for larger site/applications, and Litmus is one of the best services available. It’s free option offers fifty tests per month with tiered individual memberships and options for team memberships that are paid beyond that. Litmus tests email formats in various email desktop and web based clients, which is a great way to test newsletter sends without having to create separate email accounts to test each client. Web page testing is more in depth in Litmus than most other options – it includes options for testing different versions of operating systems in addition to every working version of virtually any web browser. One of the more unique things about Litmus is its bug catcher. Litmus identifies and lists bugs alongside screenshots of a preview of your website in whatever browser/OS/version the bug is present in.
Here are a few other good tools to check out, in addition to Litmus:
No matter how big your project, it’s probably best to use a combination of the above services to cover all your website’s bases. Do you use other browser testing tools? Please comment below and share with everyone!
