Expression Web SuperPreview

To do compatibility testing of a web page I usually have to fire up a VPC and access the page from a browser instance inside that VPC (one VPC for IE6, another one for IE7, etc.)

How many times have you had to debug your web pages on virtual or multiple machines running different versions of Internet Explorer? Or had to wait for a slow web service to return renderings of your pages?

You don't have to do that anymore. Now you can debug your pages on multiple versions of IE on the same machine that you use for Web development.

Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer is a stand-alone visual debugging tool that makes it faster and easier to migrate your sites from IE6 to IE7 or IE8. With SuperPreview, you can ensure that your Web sites work correctly in IE8 while also maintaining compatibility with earlier versions of IE.

SuperPreview shows your web pages rendered in IE6 and either IE7 or IE8, depending on which version you have installed on your machine. You can view the pages side by side or as an onion-skin overlay and use rulers, guides and zoom/pan tools to precisely identify differences in layout. You can even compare your page comp to how the targeted browsers render the page.

To help you quickly identify problem elements, DOM highlighting shows absolute positions of the rendered elements and HTML elements display CSS properties.

And perhaps what I think is the coolest feature, an overlay mode to compare exactly what’s different for pixel-perfect alignment. Or if you cross your eyes, the web in 3D.

Finally, how you can get your dirty web developer paws on this awesome tool, and it’s a little complicated to say the least. The beta of this software available right now is downloadable from Microsoft.com (250MB). The catch being it only supports renderings between IE6 and versions of IE installed on your computer already, but it should ease the pain of testing for IE6/7/8 compatibility for a lot of devs.

The full and final version of this product will be bundled together with Expression Web 3, sometime later this year and will run as a separate standalone application. Unfortunately for the many Mac web developers out there, because Expression Web is not an application part of the Expression Mac suite, SuperPreview will not be available.