Cross Browser Testing with BrowserCam.com

Any decent web designer nowadays understands the value of cross browser and cross platform compatability. You can put a serious dent in your site traffic by only making it available to say, just Internet Explorer. Unfortunately the luxury of having every browser on every platform isn't something alot of agencies have the time or money to setup.

www.browsercam.com is a manged service providing access to every type of platform/browser combination and any combination they don't have they can setup for you. They offer two main services, screen capture and remote access.

The screen capture lets you select the OS (type and version), browser, screen res and whether flash is installed or not, you then enter a url of your site you wish to test and it will fire off and take a screen grab from each of the chosen setups and save it as an image file for you to browse. A very quick way of checking a page in alot of different setups quickly. You can also set it to crawl hyperlinks and grab child pages.

Remote access does exactly what it says on the tin. Using the excellent VNC viewer you can have remote access to an actual machine to use to check how your site works on various platforms.

The pricing is reasonable and you can sign up for 24 hour, monthly, three monthly or annual access to either or both services. I have tried both (screen grab offers a free 24 hour trial and unlimited remote access for 24 hours is just $19.99) and the service works well. There was one minor usability issue I discovered (which I emailed about and had a quick response) but overall this is an excellent service I will be using again. I have access to a number of platforms in our office, but nothing compared to this. The convenience of this service which I can use from one machine is too good not to use.