Thursday, January 5th, 2006
SafariTest: Browser Testing for non-Mac folk
We talked about BrowserShot.org in a past entry.
If you have a lot of the browsers covered, but really need a way to check out Safari, then you can use SafariTest.
Other than just supporting Safari, there are some issues:
- frames and Flash movies are not perfectly supported
- if your page uses client-side redirection you must enter the final address
- remove any #anchor at the end of the URL
- of course, password protected pages are not accessible by SafariTest
Is a screenshot enough? If you don’t have Safari, that means you don’t have a Mac, and therefore don’t you also need FF on the Mac, and X on the Mac, …?
4.2 rating from 15 votes
This reminds of just a wrapper for the superb webkit2png application which has been around for a bit.
I wrote a parser a while back which would snag the last (n) sites you would surf to in Safari, shove the list over to webkit2png and output a local HTML page as a “visual history” of sorts. Worked really well.
Cheers,
tom
[...] Source [...]
Be sure to also check out http://browsershots.org. It doesn’t return an image of the whole rendered page though, just a screenshot.
(Wow, new design!)
“Is a screenshot enough? If you don’t have Safari, that means you don’t have a Mac, and therefore don’t you also need FF on the Mac, and X on the Mac, …?� — I wouldn’t worry much about Firefox and other Gecko stuff. Afterall, if you have a PC and really want to test a lot of browsers, you already test against Gecko ‘at home’. This screenshot should give an idea about the state of the fonts there and even if not precisely, it should give an idea about the general look of the stuff.
Alternatively, PearPC to the rescue (and an OS X you acquired… somehow…)
Wow, this thing rocks!!
I don’t own a mac, but i try as hard as possible to get my sites compattible for mac aswell.
This tool isn’t gonna help me develop websites, but it will serves as a nice checkup, just to be sure that the work you’ve done is worth while.
I’ve always had good experience with Browsercam which uses VNC login for a number of browsers & platforms.
Great post!, just wondering if anyone knows if there is any service for mac people who cant see their stuff on MSIE for windows, whenever i am working at home with my powerbook i cant see how any of it looks on windows until i get back into work? It gets annoying when youve got somthing beautiful on firefox and safari and then you see it on MSIE and its all over the place in pieces.
for PC and Mac users - get screenshots of your site in different browsers at http://www.browsershots.org
(it can sometimes take a while, though)
hth
CrossBrowserTesting.com provides both Mac and PC configurations to do live testing of your web site via a VNC connection. We offer free 5 minute testing sessions so you can try it out or do a quick test. There is an inexpensive paid option for professional designers.