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!