IE8 RC1 browser testing

Microsoft's IE8 RC1 browser is now available on Windows XP and Vista for testing. RC1 stands for Release Candidate 1 - this is likely to be Microsoft's 'final cut' before the general release of IE8. Use this opportunity to check out your sites and correct any issues before the phone calls start coming in!

Look for the following configurations:


You can read more about IE8 RC1.

Thanks,
Ken

And the winner is...

yudhiecavalera! If you are looking for some design work, we recommend contacting him. Don't keep him too busy though, we'll be needing some more from him.

We were not sure what to expect from the contest at 99designs.com, but we are glad we tried it. We got a nice logo an we can't wait to put it into use. The place could use a little sprucing up. ;-)

Mike

Help us 'Redirect' our image

We are using 99designs.com to get some help creating a brand for our service. We are having a logo designed first and we hope to quickly follow that up with a website redesign.

If you are interested, the link is http://99designs.com/contests/16361. Since most of our users are designers, we are hoping that one or more of you will help us with establishing our brand and a new look. We hope to start a relationship with a designer and as I said, follow with a complete website overhall.

It isn't hard to tell that we are code monkeys and not designers. One indicator would be the way our site looks now (we butchered a really nice css template) and the other would be the fact we thought it was clever to say we are 'redirecting' our image with our $302 prize. For the less nerdy among you, a 302 is a server side redirect code. See, we need help (on sooo many levels).

So please help us out. We really would love for our users to help us shape the future of our site, both in functionality and form.

Mike

Future proof your site - Test the Windows 7 Beta and IE8!

We have added a few instances of the Windows 7 Beta to our list of browser testing configurations. You can use this configuration to perform a browser test of your site with IE 8 beta while running on Windows 7.

We set the configurations up last night, and I will have to say the Windows 7 install was really nice - it seemed stable and quick. Overall, I have to think this Windows 7 release is going to be an improvement over Windows Vista. There is a slight artifact that is sometimes showing up on the vnc display - the bottom task bar is sometimes black. Moving your cursor over it corrects this issue.

We have created a slideshow of some of the Windows 7 and IE8 features - this slideshow uses our builtin slideshow creator. Here is a preview of it:




View a full sized version of this Windows 7 / IE8 tour

We are busy working on delivering automated screenshot capability across browsers to CrossBrowserTesting.com, but felt our users would like the opportunity to try out WIndows 7.

The CrossBrowserTesting.com Team

IE's demise makes "cross browser" even more important

Here is a great article on SitePoint about how IE's decline is making crossbrowsertesting.com important for web developers.

As browser parity nears (at least in terms of user reach), cross browser and cross platform functionality is becoming more and more important.

Web developers will end up with more work for all of this of course. Which is why we came up with a site for browser testing in the first place (we are web developers!)
So when IE10 and Chrome4 are in heated competition and you need to test a web page we will be there!

first year for crossbrowsertesting.com

Crossbrowsertesting.com started this year (in March really) because of a need that we had.  We thought other people probably had the same problem: cross browser testing.

In the 9 months that we have been active, we have had just over 38,000 individual browser testing sessions run.  During that same 9 months, we went from 3 users (us) to over 6,700 registered users!

In 2008 we added Macs, slideshows, snapshots to flickr and the ability to run your own local VNC client (my favorite). 

The last thing we added was subscriptions and that has done really well.

What lies ahead should be interesting and hopefully exciting (at least as exciting as testing browser compatibility can be...).

As we continue to grow, we are grateful and happy that customers find our service useful.

Thanks!
from the crossbrowsertesting.com team