One of the most frustrating and time consuming tasks a web developer must endure is making a site cross browser compatible. No wonder why there are so many people talking about the lack of standardization among the web browsers, specially the IEx family.

As you may already know there is a variety of online rendering services: like Browsershots or Litmus. Most of these services provide a way to render your page in different browser versions running on several operating systems, and sometimes it’s possible to test your pages in different resolutions too.   Here at Artinsoft we believe that the approach taken by these services provides a lot of value, but we think that they fall short on helping the developer to trace the source of the problem.

Because of the problem described above we came up with our own cross browser compatibility checker browser oriented service codenamed BrowserCheckr.  You can think of this service as a complement to the rendering services. It’s similar to Dreamweaver’s BCC in the sense that we analyze the page and search for potential rendering problems, then, we give a report that point out the elements that may have problems in certain browser(s) and provide documentation of what is the problem and how can it be fixed.

In the near future we also expect to provide a way to help to fix the problems found. We are brainstorming it so feel free to share your ideas about it with us.

For the time being what we have is a prototype that showcases the user experience and makes a basic detection of 6 of the most common IE6 bugs:

·         The margin size is doubled.

·         min-height and min-width are not supported in IE6

·         The escaping floats problem  .

·         Centering using margin-left and margin-right set to auto

·         The stairs effect in menus using ul/li.

·         The inherited margin problem.

We will really appreciate it, if you take a moment to check our prototype. We are working hard to keep improving BrowserCheckr to help keep you site looking great in all the browsers. Please visit BrowserCheckr and leave a comment. Only with your continuous feedback we can get a powerful tool for you.