a frontend designer
projects

Browser Proofer

When we first starting building books at Inkling our primary target device was the iPad. It was great not having to concern ourselves with cross-browser issues. But as we expanded our reading options to the web we had to make existing content work on desktop browsers including IE 9+, Firefox, and Chrome.

On the left, thumbnails from each page in a sampling of chapters from each browser. On the right, full-length screenshots can be viewed side-by-side, all scrolling simultaneously.

It was not possible to proof each page in each browser with any efficiency. So as a proof of concept I built a script that would parse a book’s table of contents and, using webkit2png, create screenshots at various sizes. It was soon made a formal project, producing a robust back-end that used a screenshot service to pull from the different browsers, and return a JSON file that I could build a front-end to.