Adobe recently release a public preview of BrowserLab - its upcoming online tool for testing websites on multiple browsers and platforms. Using the tool you can simply input the URL of any website to view the way that webpage would appear on a number of browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari on Windows and Mac.

The screenshots of the webpage take a short while to be generated, and then they can compared on side by side preview or an ‘onion skin view’ for which two versions of the page can be directly placed over each other.

The tool could also be used on Dreamweaver CS4 after installing a number of BrowserLab Extensions to test local and active content before publishing it on the web.

This service should be helpful to web developers as the difference in rendering between browsers could be massive. The list of supported browsers does not currently include Chrome, but as Chrome is based on the WebKit rendering engine it should have a very similar output to Safari.

This service will probably not be of great importance to Flash developers as the display of Flash content is not affected by the type of browser or its version as long as the same Flash Player version is installed.

You can test this service free of charge now by visiting its online portal.