ruki spot

If you design websites, chances are you have wished there was an easier way to test your new creation on all the popular browsers. Unless you own a Mac, Linux and Windows machine or run a virtual computer with these three operating systems on your machine, chances are you will have to resort to asking your friends or users how your website looks like on their browser. Browsers each display websites slightly differently, and just because your website looks great in Internet Explorer doesn’t mean it will look they way you want it in Fire Fox and vice versa.

Someone has thought about this problem and come up with a solution and best of all it is free to use! At browsershots.org you can submit your website’s URL and it will be added to the job queue. browsershots.org have many machines (called factories) that will eventually browse to the page you requested and take a screen shot of what your website looks like in the host browser. At submission you can select the browsers you wish to test for. If your website page is larger than a screenful, browsershots.org will take an enlongated screenshot so you can see your whole page within the screen shot. This is pretty cool!

My only critism for browsershots.org is that the queue is constantly full and it can take up to four hours for your job to be completed, in some cases you may have to resubmit again if the job queue is too large. Take a look at some of their statistics within their website, it is pretty impressive. They sure are very busy!

So next time you find yourself wondering what your website looks like in other browsers, head off to browsershots.org and take a look for yourself!