Browserbite Tests Your Website Across Browsers Using Computer Vision

    After finding out about Browserbite, I pointed out to CEO and founder Kaspar Loog that there are a lot of services out there that already let you test your website across multiple browsers and operating systems. He responded that that’s exactly the point, there are a lot out there that will let you compare how your website looks.

    Browserbite takes a different angle by using an intelligent computer vision algorithm that does the comparison for you and gives the result in a easy-to-understand format. Instead of comparing naked screenshot to screenshot, The Tallinn-based company highlights the “different” areas in red, using your own browser as the baseline.

    The obvious result to this is speed. It normally takes 20-30 seconds for all your screenshots and analysis to load, which helps you figure out your problem areas in no-time compared to being faced with a big album of screenshots.

    Browserbite offers several handy features. Once drilling down on a single browser’s screenshot, you can see the highlighted differences between your baseline, see a whole-page screenshot, or also this “overlay” feature where you can move a slider to fade back and forth between browser screenshots. It’s fun to play with, and it makes the differences really jump out.

    The service covers 93% of the global market share of browsers and operating systems, but Loog points out that it can also really depend on the context of a given website.

    “One interesting thing is that if your website is broken on say, Safari, then you tend to have less visitors with that browsers. The Safari users simply turn away. So even the browser statistics might not tell the whole story for a particular website.”

    This relatively simple, but useful, service isn’t all they have in the pipeline. Loog also demoed a chrome browser plugin that allows you to interact with your website, like log in to your service, or buy something on your commerce platform, and then see screenshots of whatever button presses or text entries you want.

    The service is free to use, although perhaps not for long as right now they are working on building a payment module. They’re considering putting MacOS and iPad behind a paywall, as well as some other rarer configurations.

    Loog says that, “The users use it, they want to continue using it, and they want to pay for it.” Which isn’t a bad position to be in.