Configuring Dreamweaver’s Preview In Browser Feature

When working on your web pages in Adobe Dreamweaver, you constantly need to check them in a web browser. To make this process smoother, Dreamweaver allows you to configure several browsers for previewing your pages. You can specify which browser is your primary, or main, browser; you can then elect a secondary browser and as many further browsers as you want.

Naturally, the first step in this procedure is to ensure that all the browser software is installed on your computer. Next, on Windows, go to the Edit menu and choose Preferences; on a Macintosh, go to the Dreamweaver menu and choose Preferences.

The various types of Preferences are displayed on the left of the window. Click on the Preview in Browser section. If you already have a browser configured as your primary browser, and possibly another as your secondary, you may wish to change these. To do so, simply click on the appropriate checkboxes to specify which is primary and which is secondary.

To add other browsers, just click on the plus sign (+), navigate to the browser software and double-click to open it. You can repeat this procedure as many times as you need to.

To preview a page using one of your configured browsers, use the Preview icon (the globe). This is located on the Document toolbar which is normally displayed at the top of the document window. From the Preview drop-down menu, choose the browser that you’d like to use. You can also make use of the keyboard shortcuts: to preview using your primary browser, Shift-F12 on Windows or option-F12 on a Macintosh; to preview using the secondary browser, Control-F12 on Windows or Command-F12 on a Macintosh. Alternatively, you can simply choose the name of any other browser.

Having looked at the preview, to return to Dreamweaver, simply close the browser window.

There may also be times when you’d like to preview pages but don’t want to save the changes you’ve made to your document. Dreamweaver offers you this possibility but, before we get to that, let’s examine what happens when you preview a file that has been modified.

Dreamweaver shows us a dialogue box asking us if we’d like to save the changes. If we click “No”, we are given a preview of the last version that was saved rather than the version that we’re currently working on. If we click “Yes”, Dreamweaver will save our changes before previewing the file. This behaviour can sometimes be inconvenient, since you may not be ready to save your changes.

If you’d like to preview files at any time without saving your changes, return to your Browser Preview section of Dreamweaver’s Preferences and activate the option “Preview Using Temporary File”. When this option is switched on, Dreamweaver will always create a temporary file containing the latest version of your document and then shows you a preview of it. When the browser window opens, look at the name of the file being previewed. It will be a temporary file name generated by Dreamweaver and not the name of document you are working on.