Adobe Shuts Down Browser Testing Service BrowserLab

An anonymous reader writes "Adobe has shut down its BrowserLab service, used by many for testing content across multiple desktop platforms. The company pointed its customers to two alternatives: BrowserStack and Sauce Labs. BrowserLab offered cross-browser testing by producing screenshots of websites from various browsers across Windows and OS X platforms. It was very useful for developers looking to support as many different users as possible."

Re:Singular vs. plural

[JBMcB]

because Microsoft isn't good at allowing IE versions to sit side-by-side.

And by that you mean you can't do it at all. MS sometimes is nice and supplies VMs with new versions of IE preinstalled, but not always.

Re:Singular vs. plural

[Kingkaid]

It is a real shame that they don't have all of those available in one place... oh wait! http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=11575 [microsoft.com] Then again, if you're making anything IE6 compatible now a days, you should be shot.

Re:12 GB and requires Windows 8

[Bogtha]

"These images are specifically designed to run on Microsoft Virtual PC, and may or may not work in other hosting environments." I'd assume that Microsoft Virtual PC is available only for Windows. Users will need to buy a copy of Windows.

ievms has automatically handled setting these images up under the cross-platform VirtualBox for years. Nevertheless, you were pointed at outdated tools. You should be looking at modern.ie [modern.ie], where Microsoft offer virtual images for multiple virtualisation systems running on Windows, Mac and Linux.

So in order to test on every browser without having to own multiple computers, one would have to replace one's current computer with a Mac (to be able to run Safari for Mac)

Doing a decent job of testing for web developers is expensive. Buying a Mac isn't a big deal. second-hand Mac Minis are cheap. It's the mobile devices you need to worry about - and no, something running on your computer is not an adequate substitute.

Lot Less Useful, These Days

[ios and web coder]

The Web standards are being followed a lot more closely by browsers. Of course, Microsoft doesn't believe in rounded corners (Anyway, I think that may be patented [theregister.co.uk]).

IE7 sucks just about as bad as IE6, but I keep a VM with IE7 (Vista) around for extreme testing.

Most of the issues I encounter these days come from JavaScript/DOM differences, and this service was worthless for that. I need to have VMs on my Mac with multiple versions of browsers. For this kind of testing, Macs are extremely useful, as I can run a full LAMP server on my Air, and run multiple VMs that connect to it as external sites. I can tweak in realtime.

VirtualHostX [clickontyler.com] is also pretty useful, as I can develop sites on my laptop, then directly transition them to the server with no fiddling with mod_rewrite or DB settings.