I am into web development and I want to check my web page for different browsers.
So I am searching for an offline tool to check cross-browser compatibility.
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2Does it have to be offline? There are plenty of web services to do this. – Chenmunka Sep 4 '15 at 9:06
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Yeah I am searching for an Offline tool, I found few (Multibrowser,seleniuom) but i dont think its useful. Can you help? – Chirag Sep 4 '15 at 9:08
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@Chirag But why? What need or criteria requires a local (not internet) app? – Basil Bourque Sep 6 '15 at 5:32
Test Browsers In Virtual Machines
You can fire up a virtual machine with a specific browser installed and test against that.
There are various possible sources of the VM images:
IE Versions and platforms
- Modern IE provides VM with the OS and Browser installed, to run on Linux, Windows & OS-X under Virtual Box (on all three platforms), VMWare (Win/OS-X), HyperV 2008/2012 (Windows) or Parallels (OS-X). Possible combinations are:
- IE 6 on XP
- IE 7 on Vista
- IE 8 on XP on Win7
- IE 9, 10 & 11 on Win7
- IE 10 on Win8
- IE 11 on Win8.1
- Edge on Win10
Other Windows Browsers
- Of course since these virtual machines have full operating systems on you can potentially install other browsers as well.
- With the facility to create your own VMs, (free in VirtualBox), you can install one or more clean version of Windows into virtual images and add specific browsers to those images.
Non-Windows
- If you use VirtualBox, or pay for the facility in some of the others, you can also create various Linux distribution images with the various browsers installed for testing.
- If you can get hold of installers or images for OS-X you can test on that as well.
- "Assuming VirtualBox you can run on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and install a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4, 2.6 and 3.x), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD."
Mobile Browsers
You might also like to take a look at the Android Developers SDK for Android Studio as this includes emulators for various Android Devices with different versions of Android, screen sizes, etc., and you can potentially download optional browsers to the emulators. I suspect that the SDKs for other mobile platforms will provide something similar.
Run W3C Validators
You would also be well advised to check your code with one or more of the W3C validators here, they are available online but most, if not all, of them have the code available to download and run yourself offline - click on check the code and look for readme files for instructions.
answered Sep 5 '15 at 16:03
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Besides Oracle VirtualBox, another two common virtualizers are Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. – Basil Bourque Sep 6 '15 at 5:34
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1@BasilBourque I know but Parallels is Mac OS-X only and VMware has clients for free but to create your own images you need the paid for version - Oracle VirtualBox is cross platform and allows creation of your own VMs for free. – Steve Barnes Sep 6 '15 at 5:43
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I posted my comment for others, for their consideration. All three are excellent products, each worthy of consideration. – Basil Bourque Sep 6 '15 at 5:50
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That is why they are all already mentioned in the answer above where there are pre-built IE images available complete with the limitations - I concentrated on Virtual Box for accessibility reasons, i.e. you can use it whatever your platform and without having to find budget. I thought that I had made it clear that it wasn't the only solution. – Steve Barnes Sep 6 '15 at 5:58
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Blisk Browser does this. They have a ton of emulators. I assume it works in offline mode, though I have not tested this. Cross browser testing is kind of their thing though. You should try that.
