Ever since the times of Netscape and the early Internet Explorer versions we have been discussing useful cross browser testing setups. I’ve seen through my career as (web-)developer, tech lead, test lead, project manager and account manager very different setups of addressing the issue of different behaviors of webpages and applications in different browsers because of different maturity levels of the software and different sets of standards and their interpretation implemented. Those include multi screen setups, two or more computers next to each other and virtualization on local or remote machines. I think one of the most popular setups by the way is to ignore cross platform and brower and hope for all on the team to only use standards that are well supported. Ever since the native support of Windows on the (Intel) Mac platform a lot of us have settled with a local virtualization engine on Mac OS that allows you to run most of the browsers and platforms out there today. It still sometimes remains cumbersome to connect all those machines to the dev environment that you are working on and keeping those environments up to date with virus protection and software support.

After all those years Adobe is now finally coming up with something really useful: Adobe BrowserLab.

BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand. BrowserLab is a powerful solution for cross-browser compatibility testing, featuring multiple viewing and comparison tools, as well as customizable preferences. Since BrowserLab is an online service, it can be accessed from virtually any computer connected to the web. Also, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software users have access to additional functionality such as testing local and active content.

It is currently free to use, but the offering is limited and I guess Adobe will ask some money for this over time, especially when adding additional platforms and browsers.

As of today the service supports

• Firefox 2.X and 3.X (Windows XP and Mac OS X)
• Internet Explorer 6.X and 7.X (Windows XP)
• Safari 3.X (Mac OS X)

With Dreamweaver CS4, BrowserLab adds the ability to test local content and different states of interactive pages.

See details on the labs page here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/, the service is available here: https://browserlab.adobe.com/