A Free Option for Checking Cross Browser Compatibility
zubenelgenubi
Registered Users Posts: 67 Big grins
All,
I just wanted to pass on a quick tip for anyone wanting to do any (free) cross-browser compatibility testing of their smugmug pages:
I recently put up a new gallery that I'm using as a blog page for a rather exciting NASA sounding rocket mission. I used some CSS for customization. (Much of it thanks to the excellent work of Nicholas Sherlock.) The gallery itself is here:
http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/SpacePhysics/Rocketry/CREX/CREX-Sounding-Rocket-Mission/
Because I used custom CSS, I wanted to check how the page rendered in browsers other than my personal workhorse, Firefox. Not having the energy to install any others, I looked for online cross browser testing services. I discovered a number, but only a couple of free ones. By far the most promising free option that I found was http://browsershots.org/. However it won't work with smugmug because it is blocked by smugmug's robots.txt file - and a quick inquiry to the Heroes confirmed that this is by intentional design, to limit bandwidth load on their servers due to low-priority traffic. It is not likely to be changed.
However I did have good enough luck with the next best choice, which is the "browser sandbox" function offered by spoon.net (https://spoon.net/browsers/). This works (for Windows users like me!) via a lightweight virtual machine that is implemented as a browser plugin. In my case I had to install a plugin for Firefox. I also had to create a free account for myself (which only required a valid email address.) It then very easily runs a virtual instance of any of a fairly wide (but far from exhaustive) selection of popular browsers. It only took me about 10 minutes to setup, and I was able to verify that although my new smugmug gallery didn't look identical everywhere, it did look good in all the browsers I tried - which was what I had been hoping for. (I did do a quick web search to check for concerns about anything sinister associated with the spoon.net plugin - but I didn't see any indication of that.)
The spoon.net browser sandbox is far from perfect, and I think it is only available for windows. There may be far better options out there that I'm not aware of. But in this instance it did the job for me, without consuming much time or effort - for what that's worth.
Just passing this on...
- Mark Conde
I just wanted to pass on a quick tip for anyone wanting to do any (free) cross-browser compatibility testing of their smugmug pages:
I recently put up a new gallery that I'm using as a blog page for a rather exciting NASA sounding rocket mission. I used some CSS for customization. (Much of it thanks to the excellent work of Nicholas Sherlock.) The gallery itself is here:
http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/SpacePhysics/Rocketry/CREX/CREX-Sounding-Rocket-Mission/
Because I used custom CSS, I wanted to check how the page rendered in browsers other than my personal workhorse, Firefox. Not having the energy to install any others, I looked for online cross browser testing services. I discovered a number, but only a couple of free ones. By far the most promising free option that I found was http://browsershots.org/. However it won't work with smugmug because it is blocked by smugmug's robots.txt file - and a quick inquiry to the Heroes confirmed that this is by intentional design, to limit bandwidth load on their servers due to low-priority traffic. It is not likely to be changed.
However I did have good enough luck with the next best choice, which is the "browser sandbox" function offered by spoon.net (https://spoon.net/browsers/). This works (for Windows users like me!) via a lightweight virtual machine that is implemented as a browser plugin. In my case I had to install a plugin for Firefox. I also had to create a free account for myself (which only required a valid email address.) It then very easily runs a virtual instance of any of a fairly wide (but far from exhaustive) selection of popular browsers. It only took me about 10 minutes to setup, and I was able to verify that although my new smugmug gallery didn't look identical everywhere, it did look good in all the browsers I tried - which was what I had been hoping for. (I did do a quick web search to check for concerns about anything sinister associated with the spoon.net plugin - but I didn't see any indication of that.)
The spoon.net browser sandbox is far from perfect, and I think it is only available for windows. There may be far better options out there that I'm not aware of. But in this instance it did the job for me, without consuming much time or effort - for what that's worth.
Just passing this on...
- Mark Conde
0
Comments
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Here's another one along the same idea:
http://quirktools.com/screenfly/