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Test Website Screen Resolutions, Mobile Compatibility

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:18:55 +0000

One of the things that you need to make sure as a webmaster is support for various screen resolutions. The rise of mobile browsing, especially on smartphones but also on low resolution devices like tablet and netbook PCs, has made this step even more important. A website that is not offering optimized contents for popular devices and resolutions could lose a lot of visitors because of this.

If you run a CSM or platform like WordPress, you can utilize plugins to create automatic and custom mobile versions of your website. You still need to test those resolutions to make sure that the sites display correctly on the devices.

Most webmasters do not own all of the devices that they need to support. The only available option to test screen resolutions and mobile compatibility is to use emulation.

Screenfly is an online service that can display a given website in predefined resolutions. Webmasters are asked to enter a web address into the form on the homepage.

This website is then displayed in one of the available resolutions. Semi-transparent buttons on the left side are provided to switch the resolution or device group. Available for selection are desktop, tablet, mobile and television devices, each with several subdevice listings.

The desktop group ranges from 10″ netbook resolutions of 1024×600 all the way up to 1920×1200, the native resolution of a 24″ monitor.

Tablet support is available for Apple’s iPad and four Android tablets including the Samsung Galaxy and the Motorola Xoom.

The mobile device category includes two Android smartphones, the Apple iPhone 3 and 4, the Asus Galaxy 7 Windows 7 phone, the Blackberry 8300 and two Motorola RAZR phones.

Television finally displays the website in a 480p, 720p and 1080p screen resolution on screen.

Switching to another device or resolution is a fluent process that happens without a reload of the page.

One interesting feature of Screenfly is the ability to detect mobile versions of a website. The service will automatically use the mobile version of a site if available and supported by the emulated device. This detection can be used to test a site’s mobile version thoroughly.

The one thing that is missing is an option to test a custom screen resolution. Webmasters who want that feature can try Simures, which supports custom screen resolutions.

Screenfly is a handy online service for webmasters to test their website’s display on different screen resolutions and mobile devices. (via)

View your site in different browsers

Clazirus — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:31:21 +0000

If you have a website, did you ever wonder how your website would look like in another browser ? It is not that practicable to download and install all browsers that you have to use to test your site. Sure, you could install the most used versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera but what about previous versions ? What about browsers in another Operating System ? This is essential for many webmasters especially for business related websites.

Well, without the hassle of installing various browsers, you could just head over to the website Browsershots. Simply insert your URL into the form and select which the browsers that you want to see your site in. You can check almost 40 different browsers that run on the operating systems Windows and Linux. Most browsers are run using Linux and only the Internet Explorer is run using Windows.

There are also some configuration options such as screen resolution, color depth, JavaScript and other setting you could enable if you want to check how your site looks with Javascript disabled or with a screen resolution of 1600×1200. When you click the submit button, your requests will be added to the queue. It will take a while before your screenshots will be uploaded, depending on your settings.

At this point, it would be wise to either bookmark the page or leave it open and refresh it later to be able to view the screenshots that are created once the queue is processed. It can take up to some hours depending on the queue and the settings that you have selected.

Automate and Record Tasks with Firefox

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:41:33 +0000

Shame on me that I did not discover this firefox extension earlier. Selenium IDE is a firefox extension that is able to automate, record and playback tasks in firefox. It has therefor more than one purposes but here is a great one that you will like. Many people do the same tasks when they start their browsers, check their webmail accounts, log into a forum they visit and check for the latest items on eBay for example.

Would not it be great if all this could be done with the click of a mouse button ? Ok, some more clicks but still a lot less than performing all those tasks by hand one after another. You will have to record the task(s) once which simply involves starting the extension and moving, typing and writing exactly as you always do. Selenium records all action and you are able to save it afterwards.

You´ll unfortunatly have to load it whenever you want to replay the task. It therefor makes only sense to me to record and save tasks that involve lots of writing, moving and clicking. Maybe there is a way to store them in your Bookmarks toolbar but I have not found a way to do so. It would be awesome if this would be possible. (Bare with me, I´am using the extension for 10 minutes..)

Seleniums main purpose is web application testing. It (not the firefox extension of course) runs in most popular browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Instead of looking at / or testing webpages in different browsers you record the task once and play it in every browser afterwards.
Take a look at a presentation video of selenium ide that shows how to record and play tasks.