Introduction
Sometimes when you are testing a page of your web application or website usng Visual Studio for cross browser compatibility you may need to check it with multiple web browsers. Without this feature, you will probably be launching the page in one of your browsers (the default one, mostly) and then copying the URL and browsing via other bowsers, one at a time. With this feature, you actually will be able to launch the page in all the desired browsers installed in your system.
Background
To open and run an application via Visual Studio, what you do is press F5 or CTRL + F5 (without debugging) or maybe via the following button in the Standard tool bar:
Notice it is labeled with "Internet Explorer" which means IE is the default browser with which your application will run. Well, you might already know how to change this to a different web browser. You do that by setting the web browser of your choice to the default browser using the following steps:
Click on the down arrow just beside the label "Internet Explorer" (it may be different on your machine), which will pull down the list of web browsers available on your machine with a few other options.
Now click on the web browser of your choice and it will set it as the default browser.
Alternatively, you may click on "Browse With..." and make the desired web browser your default browser to run web applications via Visual Studio.
Now, it's okay to have this feature but what if you are checking your web application for cross browser compatibility and you want to get verify information in each of the browsers, or maybe some of the major web browsers installed in your system? Without the feature we'll see next, it's a lengthy job.
How does it work?
Click on "Browse With..." as you did in the above step.
Then click on the web browser names in the list while keeping CTRL key pressed.
Then click "Set as Default".
Close the popup window and now your Standard Toolbox should look as follows:
Now, press CTRL + F5 to browse on multiple browsers at the same time.
Note
You can debug with only one browser which you still can do by pressing F5 key.
Conclusion
Hopefully, next time you need to browse your web application on multiple web browsers, this tip will come handy. Thanks for reading. Please share your feedback.