BrowserSeal is finally up and running!

It took a lot of effort to make this first beta version happen and there are tons of work ahead. However, it is up and running and there are people who actually use even the very limited beta version, which is encouraging.

Some time ago I realized that the issue of cross browser testing, which is quite problematic already, will only get worse in the foreseeable future. Although one can think of many tools that can make the process of cross browser testing easier for a web developer, to my greatest surprise I found out that even something as trivial as taking a screenshot of your web site in different browsers is a big problem. True, there are tools that can do this, but all of them are terribly slow and sometimes not very cheap either.

The problem with all browser screenshot services, starting from the free Browsershots and including soon-to-become expensive Adobe Browserlab, is that they are... services. It takes painful minutes to get your web site rendered on the server farm somewhere on the other end of the world and than get the results back. Not to mention that the process of launching the screenshot is a bit cumbersome.

Wouldn't it be great to fire the screenshot application with a single click of a mouse and have all the results on your screen in just a few seconds! Well, this is what BrowserSeal is about. Browser screenshots with a balzing speed and an ease of use that a web service can never compete with.

How do I do this ? The key is not to use a render farm approach. All components of BrowserSeal run locally on your PC, including the browsers. You may think that this is the catch, but in reality it is not - Windows users can easily run all major browsers (including IE6, IE7 and IE8 with the help of IE Collection) locally. Unfortunately, for Mac and Linux users there is no easy solution.

There is a nice side effect of implementing BrowserSeal as a standalone application which does not require an expensive server farm - it will allow me to be very price competitive.

As I said, BrowserSeal is up and a free beta version is available for download. It currently supports Firefox, Safari and one IE browsers only, but the first commercial version due to the end of October will support multiple IE versions and Opera and will also have numerous performance and usability improvements.