Tag: BrowserLab

BrowserLab is Free

A few months back I did a post about rewriting my site with HTML5. It just got reposted by DZone. It picked up a few reads including one from the Product Manger for BrowserLab, Bruce Bowman.

He took me to task for claiming that you had to be a CS5 customer to use BrowserLab. To quote Bruce:

While it is true that when registering CS5 apps, you are given an opportunity to also get a CS Live account, which includes BrowserLab, it is not required to buy a CS application – anyone can register for a free BrowserLab account, even if they don’t own any Adobe products. All that is required is an AdobeID. They just need to go to http://browserlab.adobe.com and follow the prompts to sign up.

Awesome, BrowserLab is free. Go forth and correct for the fact that browser companies love features and hate developers!

BrowserLab and DOM manipulation

I was recently working on a redesign to my site that required some DOM manipulation to make HTML5 semantic content like <header> and <footer> show up. Basically, you have to create those elements on page load to get IE to render CSS effects on them.

I was running into a problem where BrowserLab showed basically a blank screen for the IE8 version of my site. It was as if the HTML5 elements weren’t being added and therefore IE 8 wouldn’t render them.

That was close to the problem, it was that the rendering didn’t happen immediately on page load. BrowserLab has a fix for this. In the upper right corner, there is a setting named “Delay”. You can use this to delay BrowserLab’s capture and therefore wait until the entire page is rendered.

An awesome little feature that makes BrowserLab that much more useful.