Check your website works

Browser Shots!

A collection of screenshots of various browsers looking at the same website

Fortunately, a service exists called Browsershots. It is very simple - you feed in your wesbite address and they test your website in lots of browsers.

The example on the  right shows a website that only works in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 and on closer examination it turns out the it does not work correctly in IE8. What you are seeing is a collection of screenshots taken from different browsers running on different computers.

It is not all roses - sometimes a test computer has problems and you see a white rectangle. It does not mean that your website is broken. If what you see is mostly white rectangles or is like the image on the right, then you have problems. 

Using browsershots is slightly tricky simply because the instructions could be better, but it is simple enough. So here's how...

1. Go to http://www.browsershots.org

2. Enter your web address including the http:// bit

3. Tick or untick all the browsers you are interested in

4. Press the Submit button next to where you typed in your web address.

5. Wait. Typically 15 to 30 minutes. Longer for Apple Mac tests. 

If you are impatient and want to see how things are progressing then there are some additional links you can click on.

• The Details link allows you to see a schedule of when the browsers are expected to produce their screenshots. To return to the screenshots display just click on the link immediately at the top of the column of predicted times where it says For: http://<your domain name>
  
  
• The Reload this page link just redraws the screen to show the lastest images (you can do the same by pressing Refresh in your browser).
  
• The Extend button is to stop the session from timing out. Normally when you run Browsershots it goes for 30 minutes. If you need it to run longer then hit Extend.

A screenshot showing all these extra options is shown below with the options circled for you.