Adobe recently re-launched Browser Lab, a real-time web-based browser compatibility tool designed to give you an instant screen shot of your website in many current browsers, even the designers craw, IE 6. It’s free, as part of the CS Live tools kit.

Why it’s innovative:

If you’re a web designer and you’re any good, you know the pain one has to bear with cross browser compatibility.  If you wanted to put a bag over your head and pretend your new site works in all browsers this tool isn’t for you.

Unfortunately the issue for most designers, is not that we can’t check our sites in modern browsers (that as designers, we all have!), it’s actually that we can’t check it in much older browsers (like you’re mum is using IE V.pretty-old.3.6).

The Good:

Browser Lab has included an onion skin view. In this view, one browser is overlaid with another so the perfectionist-designer can see exactly where the elements don’t line up.

You can launch it from Dreamweaver.

View x and y axis rulers in pixel units which allows you to see if your code is doing what its supposed to.

It’s a fast learning tool for quirks in various browsers.

The Bad:

Don’t go uninstalling your testing browsers any time soon kids, this list is pretty long.

It only delivers a screenshot. There is no emulation so you can’t test buttons, flash, javascript, or any interaction on the page.

In the first launch, oddly absent from the list, was Opera. The O-Brow makes up the big five but evidently Adobe didn’t think so. The re-launch has all the major Windows and Apple browsers; however open-source browsers on Ubuntu or Linux have once again been left off the invite list.

While there are a number of viewing choices like 2-up and onion skin, Adobe Browser Lab is exceptionally slow to load them. On a 10mbps cable connection the view takes about 45 seconds to load. If you’re doing mini-tweaks on your site you’re in for a long wait every time you have to refresh the Lab.

There are over 10 browsers to choose from, but the versions of each browser are limited to 3 or less.

Why it’s not the ultimate tool:

The “browsers” in Adobe Lab render the pages incorrectly. While Internet Explorer 6 view was on the money, IE 7, Chrome, Safari and Opera (which I tested in the real browsers on my two laptops) all “rendered” incorrectly in Browser Lab. I spent almost half a day working through bugs that weren’t really bugs when tested in the real browsers themselves.

Try it out. It’s about 75% accurate. But don’t pull your hair out if you’re making design choices you know are supported by a certain browser and they’re not looking right in Browser Lab.