Someone recently pointed out a screenshot service that is available for free called IE NetRenderer. My experience has shown over time that most of these services become overwhelmed and eventually convert to paid services or disappear.

In this case I found it a little confusing to use. You have to select one of the several IE browsers at the top and then ask it to render. It worked fine on this site using IE7 as the selection. Next I tried one of the mixed choices (no idea exactly what that means yet) and it rendered an error message.

I then tried loading the page in IE 5.5 … it said I was trying to abuse their system by reloading so fast. How is a re-load after an error abuse. My advice for now is to skip this service unless it can be improved.

What system do you use? Use the contact form to the left to make suggestions and I’ll add the best to this article.

Continued:
Someone suggested browsershots.org, so I’ll give that one a try next. My initial reaction is that it allows a lot greater selection of browsers (some I have actually never heard of). It puts you into a que where you then sit and wait for your results. As I understand it they have a number of “factories” distributed about which are people with computers willing to place your site in their browser, capture it and upload it. It appears most factories are uploading a bit under a thousand images a day. I’ll report back on this one I guess as I follow progress on our success page. Over the next few hours my screenshots started appearing. What I don’t like is that it is on me to check back. If it would say, email me after the shooting has finished, that might be nice. When I set 30 minutes I got zero screenshots. When I set four hours, I got a half dozen. The other flaw is that they shoot at a set time and in our case we were actually in the middle of a page overhaul that slowed loading time, so many of my shots were not complete.

This article was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 8:19 pm