Previewing Web Pages in BrowserLab

Adobe’s BrowserLab service is like having a legion of Macintoshes and PCs with various browser types and versions at your beck and call. Basically, BrowserLab provides screenshots of your web pages so you can see how your designs hold up in different browsers. If you’re on Windows and don’t have access to a Mac, or vice versa, BrowserLab is a simple way to cross-browser test. You can even test interactive page elements, like Spry drop-down menus.

Note

As of this writing BrowserLab is still in a beta-testing phase and is free. However, Adobe ultimately plans to turn this into a pay service, probably with a monthly service contract. They haven’t released any details on pricing yet, but they indicated that they want to offer it at a price that’s lower than similar commercial services, like the ones described in the FAQ on Checking just one page.

BrowserLab Setup

Dreamweaver lets you access BrowserLab as if you were previewing your page in a web browser, by choosing File→Preview In Browser→BrowserLab. However, you need to do a little setup before you can get it to work:

  1. Get an Adobe Account atwww.adobe.com/cfusion/membership.

    To use BrowserLab you need an Adobe account: it’s free and you only need to supply a few pieces of information, like your name, email address, city, country, and Zip code. Once you have an account, you can sign up for BrowserLab

  2. Visit https://browserlab.adobe.com and click the Sign In button in the top right of the page.

    A form appears ...

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