Homepage of Otley based Multimedia and Web designer Mark Langdale

An important part of website design is to make sure that a website displays correctly in all of the most popular internet browsers.

I’d like to share a little batch script I created that saves time and effort by opening a website in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and IETester in one go (provided you have these browsers installed on your computer).
@echo off
set /p var= Which URL would you like to open?
start "Internet Explorer" "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE" %var%
start "Firefox" "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" %var%
start "Opera" "C:\Program Files\Opera\Opera.exe" %var%
start "Safari" "C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.exe" %var%
start "IETester" "C:\Program Files\Core Services\IETester\IETester.exe" %var%
exit


To use this script simply copy and paste it into notepad and save it as a .bat file (eg. browsercheck.bat) then double click the batch file to use it. A window will appear that prompts you to enter the URL of your website, hit Enter and you’re away!

To add functionality to open Google Chrome it’s a little more complicated. You need to find the target location for Chrome’s executable file. This can be found by right clicking on the shortcut to Google Chrome and clicking “Properties”. Typically the final command will look like the following, with username replaced with your username:

Windows XP

start "Google Chrome" "C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\chrome.exe" %var%

Windows Vista/Windows 7

start "Google Chrome" "C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\chrome.exe" %var%