Occasionally I receive a client request to fix a design bug in a browser I don’t currently have access to. When this happens I turn to a site called Browsershots that lets you submit a URL and, after a short wait, get full-sized images of your URL running in a wide variety of browsers on multiple platforms.

Browsershots is an open source project started by Johann C. Rocholl that uses a distributed system of volunteer computers to open up sites in the different browsers, capture the screen and send the resulting image back to the requesting user.

The list of browsers includes:

Windows
Firefox 1.5
Firefox 2.0
MSIE 5.0
MSIE 5.5
MSIE 6.0
MSIE 7.0
Opera 9.24
Safari 3.0

Mac OS
Firefox 2.0
Safari 1.3
Safari 2.0
Safari 3.0

Linux
Epiphany 2.14
Firefox 1.5
Firefox 2.0
Galeon 2.0
Iceweasel 2.0
Konqueror 3.5
NetFront 3.2
Opera 9.24

As a Mac guy, I definitely find the different versions of Internet Explorer that Browsershots supports to be the most valuable. After you make your browser selections, you can optionally choose screen size, color depth, versions of Javascript and Flash and even whether or not Java is installed.

The site is genius and highly recommended.