BrowserLab: A Browser Rendering Comparison Service

As I work in a shop heavily dominated by technologies from Adobe, I tend to keep pretty current with the company's latest Web development activities. Adobe has been really busy this past week, churning out beta after beta of new technologies and products. In addition to the launch of the Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst betas, and the launch of Adobe Presentations beta, Adobe yesterday announced the availability of the beta of BrowserLab (code-named "Meer Meer").

BrowserLab lets you see what your Web pages look like in a variety of browsers on both the Mac and Windows platforms. Everything is done inside of your Web browser and everything is rendered as part of a Flex application. You can see what a single browser rendering looks like, or compare two side-by-side. There's even an onion skin view which, while hard on the eyes, lets you see the pixel-precise differences between, say, how Firefox 3 and IE6 render pages.

BrowserLab currently only supports Firefox 2 and 3 on Windows, IE 6 and 7 on Windows, Firefox 3 on the Mac and Safari 3 on the Mac. One would expect that additional browsers (eg; IE 8) will be supported soon. I'd personally like to see support for Safari on Windows and Safari 2 on the Mac, but given the small market share of those browsers, my guess is that Adobe will forgo them. There's no mention of mobile browsers (Opera Mobile, Mobile IE and Safari for the iPhone), which is surprising given the rise of mobile browsing — especially on the iPhone.

BrowserLab currently supports previewing of public Web pages only. That is, if the page requires a login, BrowserLab can't access it. Additionally, if you develop on your desktop, you need to be using Dreamweaver CS4 (and a couple add-ins provided by Adobe) to see your locally developed content in BrowserLab. That's kind of a bummer for those of us who don't use Dreamweaver CS4 (or Dreamweaver at all), and something of a major oversight compared to a tool like Litmus (which also supports many more Web browsers, as well as email clients). Most designers and developers build and test pages locally before going off to a staging or testing server, so the inability to do the comparison work while you are developing locally is a pretty big drawback to the service, in my opinion. Of course, I could always go purchase Dreamweaver CS4 and then I'd have nothing to complain about.

I understand why Adobe is doing this, though: make Dreamweaver a requirement and you can sell more software. Adobe has an interest in getting people to use more of their software and their services, so tying the two together is no surprise. It's Microsoft's stated approach, and, ultimately, Google's as well (remember that not everything Google does is free — try using Maps for anything other than a non-personal, non-profit site and you'll have to pay).

BrowserLab is currently free, but the expectation is that once it comes out of beta, a fee will be required for the service.