For web designers, developers and bloggers, they are always conscious of how web pages will look like on the screen in different web browser versions and operating systems. Firefox alone has at least 5 major release versions – how are you going to run or install all of them on single computer?

More savvy users will try to solve the problem by using virtual machines to emulate each browser on separate virtual machines. However, this is painstakingly time consuming and inefficient.

Enter Browsershots.org, a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will take screenshots and upload them to the central server so you can see the image results.

The steps are pretty straight forward. Just enter the URL of the page, then check the browser versions under each operating system.  There are a bunch of CSS and HTML related ads, but don’t let them distract you. Click the submit button to see the screenshots.

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The screenshots will come out in a few minutes. You can instantly see the major differences in each browsers’ rendering of the webpage just by looking at the thumbnails.

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You can click on each thumbnail to see the larger version of the screenshot.  You could use this web tool to test the rendering of your page. You will know within a few minutes if the page is compatible with the browser that you selected or not.

I usually test a page on the popular browsers like Firefox version 2.0 and above, MS Internet Explorer 6 and above, Opera 8 and above, Safari and Chrome.

This is a great tool but its ads is are just too big for my taste. It also has stability issues that sometimes cause the service to throw a “504 Gateway Time-out” error. It usually comes back up again after a few tries, but I hope they fix it.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.