2009/03/31

Daily Gyan

Expression Web SuperPreview From Microsoft Helps You Test Your Web Site In Multiple Browsers

Posted: 30 Mar 2009 09:48 PM PDT

Web developers know the difficulty. Each change made to the backend code, HTML or CSS files needs to be tested in all popular browsers – a pretty long list containing Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari 3, Safari 4 then IE6, IE7 and IE8.

In today's Windows Gyan column, we introduce you to a new and great application from Microsoft that enables you to test run your web site in all popular browser rendering engines including all versions of Internet Explorer.

Though 'Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer' is a ridiculously long name for such a cool application, this tool really kicks ass. It is a visual debugging tool that allows you to see and compare how your site will look in IE6 and compare it to how it will look in other browsers like IE7, IE8 and other popular browsers .

You can either compare it side by side as shown below:

or you can compare using an onion-skin overlay where you display one on top of another to get a pixel perfect idea of the differences in rendering in two browsers:

[screenshots from istartedsomething blog]

The current beta build of SuperPreview allows you to compare between IE6 and the browser installed in your machine only (either IE7 or IE8). Future builds are said to have capability to render and compare with external browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome. Another feature that is rumored to be in the pipeline is remote rendering where you can compare the rendering with that of a browser running in a completely different OS, like Firefox in Linux or Safari in Mac OSX.

Final version of the product is supposed to be bundled with Expression Web 3, to be released by the end of this year. Till then you can download the beta version from the Microsoft site.

Download Expression Web SuperPreview | Direct download link (250MB)

[via istartedsomething blog]