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.

The catch with the download version is that it uses “screenshot factoriesâ€? to produce the screenshots and that these factories need to run on the operating systems and browsers that they produce screenshots for. So you need to have computers or virtual instances with the operating systems and browsers that you want to use as screenshot factories which requires a fair amount of infrastructure and support. It also means that when a new version of a browser or OS comes out you may need to create several more screenshot factories. So how is this better than simply having a bunch of test machines? The advantage is scalability and ease of use because multiple users have access directly from their desktops. One downside is that users get to see screenshots of what a particular Web page looks like and can’t interact with it so you cannot test interactivity like DHTML and AJAX.

There are other solutions like using VMWare virtual appliances for each of the operating system/browser combinations. This is a quicker and possibly easier solution, but doesn’t scale as well with multiple users (or testers). Another solution is using a high-end service like Gomez and while they offer a lot more it comes with a price!

Technically all you need to do is add a few Registry keys, but most people hate to do that so here’s what I’d suggest:

For Windows XP:
Download and install TweakUI, a Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP application. Then from the Control Panel, start Tweak UI and update your view source editor under Internet Explorer | View Source.

For Windows 2000:
First you have to ask yourself why you are still on Win2K?! (oh, right, thanks to the corporate build I am too). Unfortunately the Tweak UI for Win2K isn’t as good and, besides, it’s really hard to find (but if you’re curious it’s here). To change your default view source editor in Windows 2000 you do need to create the needed Registry entries. What you need to do is to create a file called whatever.reg and then to copy the following text into that file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\View Source Editor]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\View Source Editor\Editor Name]
@=”D:\\Portable\\NotePad++\\notepad++.exe”

Note: Edit the last line to point to the editor of your choice (notice that you need double backslashes in the path)

Then double-click on the whatever.reg file and accept the “Are you sure” warning.

Alternatively you can manually create the above registry keys. Or upgrade to XP.

• 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.