Wow, how much time will Adobe BrowserLab save web designers, collectively? Wednesday Adobe will unveil a free preview of BrowserLab, which will use virtualization technology to let you test your sites in Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 for Mac and Windows (for now). Talk about making it easier to perform a task that is easily neglected.
As handy as BrowserLab sounds, it’s especially attractive for Dreamweaver users, as there is integration with Dreamweaver, which among other things will let you look at various states of interactivity, such as dynamic widgets, a mouse rollover effect, or AJAX-driven content.

The ongoing birth of extensions for Chrome. Obviously plugins are a huge part of Firefox’s popularity and just as clearly it was just a matter of time before we saw the Chrome Extension as well. They aren’t there yet, but you can check early functionality by taking a look at some pretty simple samples here. Also the very cool Cleeki now supports Chrome. If you’d like to dive into writing simple extensions you can start here.
Note that in order to run these samples or write your own you must have the Chrome dev channel release. (In case you’re hesitant, per Matt Cutts apparently it’s no less stable than the Chrome beta.)

I’ve been given 100 invites for Googles new Chrome web browser.  Leave a comment and I’ll pass one along.

Most of the tech blogging world is probably talking about Apple Safari for Windows (yawn) but I am today blogging about a new browser called SpaceTime.  SpaceTime allows you to visually browse in a cool 3D workspace.  When you search at Google, your results are displayed in a 3D stack where you can easily view the results by shuffling through the stack.  There are similar stacks for image search, Flickr search and Ebay Search.  Currently the browser is Windows only, but a Mac version is promised soon.  I could not find out what browsing engine it’s using, however given that a Mac version is on the way, it is probably not based on IE.

If you’re still keeping up with the browser wars, Percy Cabello has a nice list of Planned features for Firefox 3. For an unedited list, you might also want to take a look on the Mozilla Wiki.

Microsoft is feeling charitable? They recently announced that anyone can have IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine through an offer that allows you to download a free Virtual PC image of Windows XP with IE6. Microsoft Virtual PC is free virtualization software that allows you to run multiple Operating Systems (Windows, Linux or Unix) while in Windows XP. This looks to be a great option for cross-browser testing!

The IEBlog has posted Details on their CSS changes for IE7 that includes an extensive list outlining bug fixes and CSS features implemented in the next version of Internet Explorer. Even though some are disappointed that the IE team did not go far enough in implementing CSS and Web standards, the post contains a statement that indicates the IE team is far from being done. So given that IE7 is being locked down to prepare for shipping, I’m sure we’ll see updates in the future.

The Surfin’ Safari blog is releasing details on some Recent WebKit Features that will eventually find their way to the Safari web browser. Of note, CSS-3 support for background-size, border-radius, overflow-x and overflow-y as well as a 20-30% boost in JavaScript performance. These additions are available if you’re interested in checking out the nightly builds – otherwise you’ll have to wait until the next version of Safari.

GetWebKit! is a new browser for Windows that is based on WebKit, the same rendering engine that is used by Safari. The browser you install is named “Swift” and has been released as an alpha product. The interface is very bare-bones, but it looks like it could be a very useful tool to text how your pages might render on a Mac!

Safari Screenshot Compatibility Test is yet another way to test your websites in Safari. The nice feature about this service is that the result is returned in only a couple of seconds. The others I have used take up to a couple of minutes.