Have you tested your Web site in different browsers and on different platforms? Web designers tend to focus on the one or two that they deem most important and often forget to test their Web sites in other browsers and on other platforms. That normally means testing sites in IE and Firefox, but the different versions of IE and Firefox and different versions of operating systems are ignored. Besides, very few have access to all the different browsers and operating systems, not to mention the hundreds of combinations that you get when you include screen sizes, Javascript versions and Flash enabled.

Browsershots is a free, open source solution for your problem. Browsershots takes screenshots of sites and displays the screen captures in .png files. You can use Browsershots as a free online service, but what makes this product cool is that it’s available as an open source (written in Python) download so that you can run it on an internal server. This is very useful when you need to test a site that isn’t live or accessible from the Internet yet. (more…)

Firefox’s “View Page Source” functionality has always been much better than IE’s “View Source” (which opens in Notepad) and sadly IE7 hasn’t changed that. There are so many much nicer text editors like Notepad++ (a portable app favorite) and Crimson Editor! More surprisingly, IE7 doesn’t even give users the option to change it. I thought that it should be an easy thing to change and it is, but I was surprised to see how many sites had misleading instructions or hack-like downloads. Most sites suggest that all you need to do is edit the default application path in your Registry, but in fact, there isn’t a default entry in the Registry unless you are running Windows XP and have Tweak UI installed. (more…)

This week I upgraded Firefox to 2.0 and also IE to IE7. Firefox has a few subtle improvements, but IE7 is all new. The main features of IE 7:

• Added tabbed browsing. It is more elegant than Firefox, has a preview tab “(Quick Tabs”) and an easier way to open a new tab.
• Collapsed menu bars. This opens a lot more of the browser window.
• Add-ons, similar to Firefox extensions. E.g. IESpell enables spell checking in forms (Firefox 2.0 does this natively)
• RSS feed handling, similar to Firefox.

Overall I think the that collapsed menu bars makes IE7 more elegant than Firefox and while I think Firefox will remain strong due to the Linux community, IE will retain and regain many users.

The second major release of the popular Firefox browser was released today. I like Firefox a lot for it’s tabbed browsing and also for the many useful plugins that are available. The one thing I don’t like about it is that it uses a lot of memory. Anyway Firefox 2.0 was released today and while it really looks very much like v1.5 it has a few improvements, most notably better support for RSS feeds and in-line spell checking (great news for bloggers!).