Handy tools for Browser Testing (IE6, IE7, FF)

Those who generally use multiple browsers as part of Cross-Browser testing for web-portals always face issues in finding multiple systems to open different browsers with different versions.

Though resources are not a constraint in many companies; user will feel cumbersome with many browsers in many places.

Let's Analyse a particular scenario in which a user wants to test his web portal in IE6,IE7, and Firefox.

The optimal solution to have all these browsers in this case is 2 . Isn't it ? IE6 and FF on one machine and IE7 on some other machine as we can't have IE6 and IE7 on a single machine.

But the following tools allow you to do this job in simple manner with all three browsers in a single machine that with in Single browser.

IETester :

This is a very light wait tool to have different versions of Internet explorer browsers in a single machine. Say you have IE6 on your system and you upgraded your IE from 6 to 7. But after some time you want to see some thing IE6 but not IE7 ... Then IETester is the solution for you where you can keep track of different IE versions in a single browser side by side. See more about by clicking the above link.

IETab:

These days I habituated to use FF than IE with its ease and options. But all the time when I sue a banking website or any other secure portals FF is not best. So i have to open a new IE window to finish my job. Can you imagine we can open IE in FF itself as new tab. Yes you can !!! with the help of a small FF add-on. It's an official add-on from FF to embed IE as a new tab in FF. With this light wait add-on installed on our FF, FF will call only the existing IE on our machine. So no need to suspect this as it is not having any control over IE. Say if we have IE7 on our machine we can just use this add-on to load IE7 as a new tab in FF itself. don't you think it is cool idea ...

Advantages of these tools:

1. No need to have many systems.

2.No need open many windows also to monitor the output.

3.It will surely save our time, taken to load multiple windows in multiple systems.

4.They are free software.

5.Test effort will be less as we can compare screens which are just side by side.

These are two tools I come across recently ... not sure there may be many other tools with nice ratings. If you come across any please leave a comment here to educate me.