June 03, 2009, 9:21 AM — Adobe has created a Web-hosted tool to help designers see how their sites look in a variety of browsers and operating systems, so they can adjust the layout as needed.
BrowserLab, previously code-named Meer Meer, displays Web pages as rendered by different browsers and provides tools to identify design inconsistencies.
The goal is to reduce the considerable time and effort that Web designers invest doing cross-browser testing, Adobe said Wednesday.
BrowserLab displays Web pages as rendered by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari in all their different operating system versions, according to the company. Adobe expects to increase the list of browsers and OSes.
Among the product's features are the ability to place different browser views of a Web page side by side, and to overlay them and zoom in to spot differences in their rendering.
In this preview phase, Adobe will make BrowserLab available for free initially in English on a "first come, first served" basis.
To use BrowserLab, users need a computer running Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS X 10.4 or later, as well as Firefox 3 or later, IE 6 or 7, or Safari 3 or later. Flash Player 10 also must be installed.
