R.I.P. BrowserLab

I wrote about BrowserLab here on Suburbia back when it launched in 2009, at the time it was one of very few web apps that let you preview websites in different browser / OS combinations. But things have moved on a lot since then with new services such as BrowserStack and Sauce which offer the much more compelling feature-set of being able to use live virtual machines accessed through your browser in order to use and test sites rather than just static screenshots.

BrowserLab has languished a bit for a while with very few desktop browser options and nothing to offer in the increasingly important areas of mobile and tablet device testing, in light of this Adobe seems to have decided that it’s better to kill it off instead of languish any further. Although some may be disappointed in this decision I had already ‘jumped ship’ and started using BrowserStack instead (as per my recent post) so it doesn’t affect my own workflow.

One bit of good news for those who enjoyed BrowserLab is that Sauce are offering a deal to BrowserLab users, for the next 30 days you can signup and get 10 free hours of testing, so go sign up for Sauce here and use ‘adobe’ as the promo code to get that offer.

I’ve just signed up for this myself and I’m going to try it out and see how it compares to BrowserStack, I can see a few differences between the two services already but I’m keen to see how the performance compares.

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