Simulate Your Website in Different Browsers with BrowserShots.org

A major pain for each and every one of us who own some website or a blog or some prototype web design is when it comes to testing. It’s not just limited to a single platform as we are talking about the world wide web. This is because the web is not just limited to a group of individuals who share the same thought but its for everyone irrespective of their PC religion. Your reader comes from different parts of the world using different computers and most importantly different browsers. So, it is important to cross-check your website on all these popular platforms before publishing. But not everyone has a high-tech computer lab set up at their home to rigorously test their website. How can you test your website on a Mac if you are using a PC or vice versa? Well, the one straight answer to the question – BrowserShots.org.

BrowserShots is a free and open-source website-based application dedicated for the purpose of testing a website across different computers of different platforms using different kinds of browsers starting from the oldest. They have computers set up at different parts of the world running different operating systems and different browsers which are automated for one purpose – to load your website. Simply go to BrowserShots.org and enter your website’s URL and click submit. Once you've submitted the URL, BrowserShots sends these URLs to their workstations which are free at the moment and which are running different kinds of operating systems (even the legacy ones) and when the page is loaded, takes a screenshot and sends it back to your space on their servers and then flashes them on your browser screen.

Browser screenshots of Sabernova after request. You can keep them for a long time.

Just like that. Impressed? It will take time for all the screenshots to appear and you will be asked to refresh the page to load newer screenshots. You can check the loaded screenshots to see how the website looks on different browsers. Even if you closed the browser due to some hurry, don’t worry as BrowserShots will store the images for some hours so that you can check them again at any time of the day.

BrowserShots still limits you from testing more and more. You are only allowed one test per day on your IP. That means you won’t be able to test your website all the time in a single day through your random updates. However, you can increase the limits by signing up for a free account which will give extended options and multiple tests per day. For faster and advanced options, you can register for priority memberships by which you will get immediate results and more storage times.

Hence, BrowserShots is a must have tool for all the web devs out there. It will become a great companion to you for testing your website prototypes to ensure that every user can access your websites hassle-freely and you can modify accordingly to squash the bugs and glitches.