Many of us get very excited when a new browser releases hoping it has bug fixes and improvements. However this could be a burden from a Web Designer’s perspective. It will be another web browser and/or version to the existing list of browser compatibility checks.

Good news is there are few free tools out there to check for cross browser compatibility of your web design work. Out of the lot my favourite for checking on different version of Internet Explorer (IE) is IETester. As of this writing, it supports IE 5.5, 6, 7, and 8. It runs independently from installed version of IE so your current installation will not be messed up. This works on Windows Vista but not without occasional crashes. Nevertheless it is the best tool I found so far to check the work on different versions of IE.

Internet Explorer Collection, as the name suggests, is another tool you can use to check compatibility between different versions of IE. This includes standalone installers from IE 1 to IE 8. Pretty neat eh? However it failed to install on Windows Vista.

Most of the time IE has issues but there could be times you need to check on Firefox too. Fear not because Sourceforge host a list of portable Firefox versions. They run independently as well thereby saving the installed version of Firefox.

Then there are snapshot services. These services show a snapshot of how your design will look on selected browser versions, some on different Operating Systems. I’m not a fan of this as I can’t check the functionality but it could come in handy for someone else. Therefore I will list the most effective and most popular ones.

Adobe Browser Lab
Browsershots
Browsercam
netrenderer

Other than these tools, there are quite a few resources for Web Designers to make the new website work on mostly used web browsers. CSS hacks does a major job especially for different IE versions. Neal Grosskopf has written a very useful guide about CSS browser hacks for FireFox, Opera, Safari, and IE.

If you know of any other resources for browser compatibility testing, please don’t hesitate to share with us.

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Tags: Browsers, Downloads, Freeware, Web Design