Hello all, are there any tools that can aid in testing a site with different browsers or do I need the common ones installed on pc?

Browser Stack (http://www.browserstack.com) is pretty good, although I don't think it's free. It's useful for rendering sites, live or on localhost, to ancient versions of IE (if you care to serve such users).

if you have windows you can load up IE and use the F12 developer tools to check out how things look in the older versions of the browser. The other common browsers can be downloaded, Chrome, Safari, Firefox etc are all self updating so you do not need to worry about the legacy versions of these. The issue comes with mobile testing. Most of the modern phones use webkit based browsers - Android and Apple, but you will still get variations with these like opera mobile and so on.

 

Browser stack is a good tool to get an idea of how things will look across all platforms but is only really an approximation. Actually having the devices to hand will always be the best way to test, but this is not practical. I find testing in Android and Apple plus the aforementioned browsers, ensuring the code validates will in almost all cases will be suffice.

Edited March 20, 201412 yr by rbrtsmith

Here’s a list of some other websites which provide cross platform browser testing tools:

1. BrowserCam – http://www.browsercam.com

2. Litmus – http://litmusapp.com

3. CrossBrowserTesting – http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com

4. BrowsrCamp – http://www.browsrcamp.com

5. Net Renderer – http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer

6. Multi Safari – http://michelf.com/projects/multi-safari

7. BrowserSeal – http://www.browserseal.com

8. BrowserShots – http://www.browsershots.org

We make a great browser testing tool called

CHECK IT OUT HERE Ghostlab

It synchronizes scrolls, clicks, reloads and form input across all connected clients. This means what you're testing is not the simple page load, but the full user experience.

We also have a built in inspector to check and debug errors on devices remotely.

Basically you can set up any javascript enable client out of the box, no set up time or effort.

^ nah

The best and honestly the only way to test is inside the actual browser. Stupid compatibility modes in IE is not an accurate way to test

 

Browserstack is good but it costs.

 

The way I do it, is to use a VirtualBox and download the VM you need from modern.ie. 100% free and you are testing in the actual browser.