You want your web visitors to be able to properly see, use and navigate your website, right? Then it only makes sense to test how your site looks and functions in the web browsers used by your web visitors. If your site doesn’t display or function properly you can then make the necessary changes.

On that basis, I recommend you fire up your website analytics program or service and find out what are the most popular web browsers used by your web visitors. You can then do the following:

1. Download those browsers, so you can see how your site looks in them; and/or
2. Use a good web browser simulation tool to test how your site looks.

I recommend you do both. While it’s handy to have a few browsers on hand for testing (especially during the web design process), you probably won’t be able to run all the browsers used by your visitors.

This is because some (or a lot) of your visitors may use different operating systems than you do, which necessitates the use of web browsers that you won’t be able to run on your machine(s). Plus, you probably don’t want to load your machine with tons of web browsers!

So what tools should you use to test how your site looks in various different web browsers? Here are four (4) tools worth considering:

1. Browserling

Browserling is a web-based service that provides a simulated view of different web browsers. Still in beta, you can use Browserling for free – either without registering (for a 90 second session) or by registering (for a 5 minute session).

I found Browserling somewhat unresponsive when I tried it out, but the technical issues may be resolved by the time you give it a whirl.

2. Browsershots

Browsershots is a web-based service that displays how your site looks across an extensive range of web browsers, browser versions and operating systems.

You can test out your site for free, but if you choose to test your site in a lot of browsers you could be waiting a long time for the various browser views to render. Alternatively you can buy the ‘priority processing’ service for $29.95 per month.

Of course, you can select only those browsers used by most of your website visitors, but the rendering could still take 10 minutes or so…

3. Multi-Browser Viewer

Multi-Browser Viewer is a downloadable software application that lets you view your website in multiple browsers and operating systems. According to the company, you can see your website in 22 standalone browsers, 5 mobile browsers/emulators and 61 screen capture browsers. The service also offers overlay image comparison and built-in HTML validation and correction.

You can trial a limited version of the service for free for 14 days or purchase one of the plans, which start at $29.95 per month.

4. Spoon

Spoon is a free, web-based service that lets you test your site in the most popular Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera browsers (with Internet Explore to come). To use Spoon you’ll need to install the Spoon plugin.

Related Articles:

• Web Design: Go Long, But Don’t Go Wide
• Do All The Links On Your Still Site Work?
• Back-Linking: Is It Possible To Get Too Many Links, Too Fast?
• IORAD Makes It Easy To Create User Training
• Microsoft Launches Internet Explorer 8, Google Releases Faster Chrome Beta

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 9th, 2011 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Technology, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.