BrowserCam - Because QA is important

What does your website look like in Safari 1.3? How about the Firefox 2.0b1 beta? The Konqueror browser on a Linux box? You really have no idea do you?

Most developers test their pages on the one or two browsers they have installed on their machine but rarely in any others and usually never in any older legacy browsers. This isn't necessarily a sign of laziness. It's just really time consuming and expensive to setup a dozen test machines with different browser configurations. That's where BrowserCam comes in.

BrowserCam is an online service which has all of these platform/browser combinations setup for you. With a BrowCam account you can test how your sites render on the widest range of possible clients and make sure everything is perfect before launch. See BrowserCam's complete list of browsers.

There are two main features available through BrowserCam.

• A Capture server where you provide a URL and a list of options and BrowserCam will give you screenshots of each platform/browser configuration you've chosen.
• A Remote Access service where you can actually log into these machines (through VNC) and use the browsers from your desktop.

To demo, I've used my account to take screenshots of how Code Scene looks in a wide range of browsers.

Linux Konqueror 3.4.0-5
Mac Camino 1.0
Mac IE 5.2
Mac Safari 1.2
Mac Safari 1.3
Mac Safari 2.0
PC AOL 9.0
PC IE 4
PC IE5
PC IE5.5
PC IE6
PC IE7RC1
PC Firefox 1.5
PC Firefox 2.0b1
PC Mozilla 1.6
PC Mozilla 1.7
PC Netscape 4.78
PC Netscape 6.2
PC Netscape 7.2
PC Opera 8.5
PC Opera 9

As you can see, Code Scene looks great in most of the newer browsers while failing miserably in some of the older ones. So what browsers should you really care about? Stay tuned for my next post on that.

For now... if you're a developer and need to QA how your site looks in different browsers, BrowserCam is the cheapest and easiest way to make that happen.