Browserstack offers a free trial. Signup through modern.ie for an extended 3 months trial. I’ve tried it and found it very useful. The features are highlighted in this post.

Live

Type the public url and choose the platform and browser. Within seconds there is the website in a virtual machine in your browser.
All common developer tools are available.

I was somewhat surprised the iOS browser was the emulator on Mavericks. But how would they automate access to an actual iPad browser?

When you want to test a local website (development) use the browser plugin. Starting from your development environment can be done with the plugins. This creates a tunnel from your machine to the browserstack cloud. Debugging local, browsing in the cloud, good stuff.

The free trial gives access to all live features for 30 minutes, trough modern.ie that is 3 months. Enough time to convince the management 😉

Automate

Testing websites with selenium is supported too. They provide the setup code and off you go. Finally use selenium to run the same test on multiple platforms and browsers, just by changing some setup.

The free trial provides you with 100 minutes of automation.

Screenshots

Automatically create a screenshot of the website on the provided url. Somewhat like Browsershots.

Nice feature is the share option. This creates a link to the screenshots result on browserstack. Here are the screenshots of this blog. Some default selected browsers timed out which looks like a bug.

The free trial allows for 100 screenshots.

Responsive

Browse your website with real browsers for screenshot purposes. Finally create a screenshot on the Motorola Droid Razr browser without actual owning it.

First impressions

The platform feels very well thought. Pricing looks expensive, but what is the price of not testing because of the setup hassle?