The website for this ride was built using Microsoft FrontPage 2003 and looks fine if viewed with Internet Explorer but looks a real mess if viewed with Firefox.

The problem is that FrontPage out of the box has default settings that assume that websites will be viewed with IE. This includes allowing the use of VML Graphics which are the main culprit for things going wrong.
We tried changing the settings on FrontPage and then re-publishing the website but that didn’t improve things at all. The only solution was to create a totally new website then edit the pages manually to remove the VML stuff that was causing Firefox (and other standards-compliant browsers) to go bananas.
As an example of what happens, where content was positioned manually using FrontPage this would be placed in the correct place by VML if the browser was IE. For other browsers there was a jpg image of the content that was displayed instead. The most obvious sign of this happening is where links don’t work when using browsers other then Internet Explorer (how could they as they are just part of an image).
The only sensible solution was to rewrite everything manually removing hundreds of lines of VML. This had the effect of improving performance as the size of the pages is reduced pretty dramatically. Also used CSS to reproduce the table based design of the original website, so FrontPage out of the box didn’t use any CSS at all.
FrontPage 2003 is hardly leading edge these days but there are quite a few websites out there that were built with this tool, and a lot of them have problems with cross-browser compatibility and modern browser standards. With some refactoring work they can be bought up to modern standards without having to re-create them from scratch.

How do you make sure your carefully crafted pages don’t fall to pieces when viewed with Safari on Mac OS or collapse in a heap under MSIE 5.0 for Windows?

You can maintain multiple operating systems and perhaps run emulations or virtual machines but it all can be very time consuming and troublesome.

So stumbling across Browsershots seemed to offer a solution to all these issues, you submit your URL and it comes back with screenshots of your webpage for a wide variety of browser and platform combinations.

In their own words what it offers is to:

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

Having used it for a while, and found various horrors lurking in what looked like perfectly viable designs, I can thoroughly recommend this service, and best of all it is free, although if you find it useful you can pay for priority processing. You may have to wait a few minutes for the screenshots to be captured and listed on the page, but that is worth it if like me you don’t can’t afford the various paid services or the cost of having a complete test suite.