Earlier this summer, Adobe started letting users in to test their new BrowserLab web application. I was pretty excited to see what Adobe could come up with (I've really enjoyed some of their other web-based applications, like Kuler...), and particularly interested to see what kind of integration they could offer with their existing products, in particular, Dreamweaver, which happens to be my editor of choice.
After a little poking around, it seems like BrowserLab is pretty darned easy to use:
- 1. Address Bar: Type in the address of the website you want to test.
- 2. Browser Sets: BrowserLab lets you create and edit "sets" of browsers, and switch between them easily, and the list of available browsers is pretty vast. Choose between Firefox 2 and 3 on XP or OSX, IE6, 7 and 8 on XP, and Safari 3 and 4 on OSX. It would be nice to see Opera and Chrome in here for the sake of completeness, but really, the available list has you covered for most of your basic cross-browser testing needs.
- 3. Views: This is probably my favourite feature. BrowserLab gives you the option to choose from 1-Up, 2-Up, and Onion Skin views. While 1-Up and 2-Up are pretty much exactly what they sound like, I thought that the "Onion Skin" option, which overlays all of your screenshots transparently on top of one another, was pretty innovative, as well as useful for tackling those smaller issues that wouldn't necessarily be obvious in a side by side view.
- 4. Delay: Basically this option lets you specify how long BrowserLab should wait before taking the screenshot of the web page you requested. Adobe's website FAQ says that you might find the feature useful if you only want to take a screenshot after an animation completes, or something similar. So far, I haven't had an occasion to use it, so I guess it's up to you to determine how useful it is.
Finally, for those of you looking for tight integration with your CS4 applications, there are a couple of Dreamweaver extensions available (Get them here). Unfortunately, anyone using a Mac, and who has also upgraded recently to Snow Leopard, will be out of luck for now. I was unable to install the extensions, and a quick pass through the BrowserLab FAQ informed me that Adobe currently does not recommend installing the Dreamweaver extensions if you're running 10.6. I'm fairly disappointed about this since Dreamweaver integration was one of the main selling points for me.
My verdict:
I still think BrowserLab is a really useful product at an especially attractive price (free, so far). It seems pretty similar to Litmus, and would probably be an excellent option for Litmus users who need more flexibility than the free membership offers (50 tests/month and only two browser options), but don't want to shell out for the premium memberships (which range from USD$24 for a day pass to USD$199 for a monthly "team" membership).
That said, BrowserLab is really only useful for checking out how things look across browsers. Anyone who who needs to check how things work will still need to check sites on another computer, or using some kind of virtual machine. I will definitely use BrowserLab to check for HTML and CSS consistency on the fly (and especially if Adobe can get those Dreamweaver extensions working in 10.6), but for the heavy lifing, I'll still have to trust Parallels!
Some links -
Check out BrowserLab, or signup for an account:
http://browserlab.adobe.com/
Instructions for updating the Adobe Extension Manager, and installing Dreamweaver extensions:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/BrowserLab/
