Simon Willison’s Weblog

Browser testing tip

23rd July 2002

I have Mozilla, Netscape 4, Internet Explorer and Opera installed on my Windows PC. I use Mozilla for browsing and the other three for testing. It turns out that all four browsers can be loaded with a specific URL from the command prompt like this:

iexplore http://www.bath.ac.uk/ - Internet Explorer
mozilla http://www.bath.ac.uk/  - Mozilla
opera http://www.bath.ac.uk/    - Opera
netscape http://www.bath.ac.uk/ - Netscape 4

Thanks to these shortcuts I can hit CTRL+R, type one of those browser names, paste in a URL and hit enter to instantly load that page—fantastic for quickly seeing how a site looks in a different browser.