BrowserSeal 1.1. released

So far we are pretty pleased with the progress we've made and the pace at which new BrowserSeal versions are being released. Less than one month since version 1.0 we are happy to introduce a new minor update which includes support for two mainstream browsers that were on many users wish list - Google Chrome and Opera.

With the addition of these browsers, BrowserSeal now supports Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7 and IE8), Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera which accounts for almost 99% browser market share!

BrowserSeal 1.1 also includes a number of bugfixes:

• URL query strings and references are now properly supported
  
• Monitors with non-standard resolution are supported as well
  
• BrowserSeal 1.1 better handles slow web sites
  
• Numerous other minor fixes
  

This update is available free of charge for our current users.

In the next version we will concentrate our efforts on some new and exciting features. Stay tuned.

After extensive beta testing and actually quite a bit of redesign BrowserSeal version 1.0 is finally out. Feature-wise the biggest improvement is support for multiple Internet Explorer versions - in addition to Firefox and Safari BrowserSeal 1.0 can make a screen capture of IE6, IE7 and IE8. These browsers have to be installed on your PC, which is possible thanks to an excellent Internet Explorer collection package. It is much better than MutipleIE - in fact, I never encountered a single issue with IE6, IE7 and IE8 installed using IE Collection.

Another major change is the fact that BrowserSeal no longer uses Selenium to drive the browser under test. At the beginning, I thought that Selenium would solve me a lot of time, but in the end quite the opposite was true. Although Selenium is a great utility with a lot of options, unfortunately it is far from being stable. When you develop a unit test using Selenium you can probably afford a certain percentage of failures, but this is unacceptable in commercial applications. In addition, although Selenium is often hailed for its multiple browser support, in reality only Firefox and Internet Explorer work reliably. Eventually, I removed Selenium and rewritten everything, relying only on Jetty embedded Java-based HTTP server and client, which is an excellent project which I highly recommend.

Accidentally, Selenium removal resulted in significant speed improvement. BrowserSeal is definitely the fastest multiple browser screenshot tool available today. No web based web site screenshot service can compete with BrowserSeal in terms of speed, especially on large web pages with scrollbars. Speaking of which, as my (obviously biased) researched showed, taking screenshots of pages with scrollbars is something that few screenshot applications/services apart from BrowserSeal handle correctly.

Free trial version with limited functionality is available for download . Note that trial version only supports Firefox, while the full version works with Firfox, Safari, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.