We are in an era of technological advancement. Everywhere we go, everywhere we see, technology is proving its mettle. If a person is curious about anything, he can google it and get all the results within seconds. Developing a website has also become a very easy job today including its accessibility. You can access a website using your laptop, tablet, mobile, and tens of other devices that you keep in your home or pocket. These websites have been running on different types of operating systems in these devices which run the browser on top of them. And the fact is that there are many browsers in the market and each browser has different rendering engines on which they work. For instance, Google Chrome uses Blink as the rendering engine and V8 as the JavaScript engine whereas Safari uses WebKit as the rendering engine and Nitro as the JavaScript engine. So, as you see a website needs to perform equally on all types of browser-operating system combinations. This is where Cross-Browser testing comes into play.
Cross-browser testing ensures that your website is compatible across all the browsers, operating systems, and resolutions and provides a smooth experience to the user. But, like no one is perfect! Cross-browser testing also brings some challenges with its great benefits. These challenges could be related to the development team or QA team, but knowing how to tackle these challenges and be prepared for them beforehand is a plus point for any team. In this article, we are going to focus on those challenges and how can we overcome them. So, let’s get started!
Testing all the combinations of Operating systems , Browsers, and Devices for cross-browser testing
Even today, many developers believe that your web application testing on one browser is enough. The common misconception is that the website will work on all the browsers if it is working on one browser. But, it’s a myth! As every browser has its own rendering engine and JavaScript engine, how it renders the website also changes. So, a CSS property might work on Opera but fail to load properly on Safari. The same goes with the JavaScript elements and so on. Hence, it becomes very important to test your website on all browsers and their versions.
Coming on the devices. Now, we are not limited to desktops only and mobile devices are also given equal privilege. They no longer are an optional thing to be tested. We know that more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. So, testing your application on all sorts of devices and operating system is also essential.
All these combinations, add up to a huge number for which we should test our website. And testing such a large number of the combination is complicated.
To handle this we can follow two approaches:
1. We can test those combinations only that are highly essential for your firm. Using an analytical tool, analyze the top browser and its version for your company and give the priority to those combinations.
2. Using an online cloud-based cross-browser testing tool such as LambdaTest can help in reducing your load.LambdaTest can help you test your website on over 2000+ browsers also providing additional benefits for the fellow testers. By using such tools we can achieve the highest test coverage and expand our browser matrix.
Frequent Browser Updates for better cross-browser testing
To stay ahead in the market from other competitors, browser vendors keep on updating their browsers every 2-4 weeks. For example, if we look at Mozilla Firefox, they keep on updating their browser every 8 weeks. Since it is recommended to keep on updating your browser, the browsers are set to automatic update as the new version brings new security patches, features, and functionalities.
But for the QA team, it creates an issue. As with every browser update, they need to re-test the web application and also update the test suite. Wouldn’t it be a hectic job for the developers and the testers to keep on re-installing and re-testing on every OS and resolution again?
To overcome this situation we can automate the test cases using an automation tool. You can use Selenium with a cloud-based tool such as LambdaTest which supports the automation testing. Since the script would be the same, it would be a piece of cake to test the website again.
Testing different Screen Resolution for Visual Bugs
We can browse a website using any device – laptop, mobile, tablet or even television these days. All these devices have different screen sizes. The testers need to make sure that the website works well on all the screen sizes. If we go on testing all the devices manually, it will take months. Testing every screen resolution manually is not an easy task. So what’s the solution for this?
The first approach is to use an automation tool such as Selenium or Hermoine to test the UI of the website and check for any visual bug.
The second approach is to use a cloud-based test automation tool. With the help of a cloud-based automation tool, we can test various screen resolutions simultaneously and can even make a list through which we do not need to select the browsers again and again. The following image demonstrates the list feature in LambdaTest.
Parallel Cross Browser Testing
A very beneficial feature that Cross-Browser testing offers is Parallel Testing. You can test multiple browsers simultaneously, this helps in reducing the time and efforts of the testers.
Parallel testing can be done through TestNG or Selenium but that needs support from the operating system and the browser installed. The problem is that even though you can test parallelly, you still need to have all the browsers and their drivers installed. This goes for just one operating system.
Cloud-based automation tool such LambdaTest provides a Parallelization feature with the help of which we can perform Parallel testing on their servers and skip the tough job.
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Testing efficiently
Once an application is developed the next step is to test the application. The testing team needs to test the application’s frontend code, backend, layout, design, cross-browser functionality, UX, performance, and the list is endless. Everyone wants to finish their work before the deadline and manually testing all these features in limited time is next to impossible tasks.
We need to figure out a solution that can be a proper solution to this testing bottleneck and help in decreasing the testing time. One of the options is Automation.
Automating the test cases in the right manner using the right automation tool will help in increasing the testing speed. This can be done on the tools that support the Selenium Grids for proper efficient testing or just running solo scripts on Selenium.
DOCTYPE Error
When you write a code in HTML language, the first line of the code shows the DOCTYPE tag. It is added in the code so that the browser can understand which version of HTML the page is written in. This is why missing DOCTYPE can cause an error. Browsers such as Internet Explorer can misbehave such as putting off images from displaying etc.
The only solution to such errors is to also check whether DOCTYPE has been added to the code or not which is must to ensure no cross-browser compatibility issues arise.
Automating Cross-Browser Testing
Automation is everywhere. From integration to testing, automation is being used to increase the throughput and provide results in minimal time. Automation needs to cover all the use cases and scenarios even to the newly integrated code so that we are not missing on anything that could prove fatal in the end. Automation testing hence becomes a challenge and programming dominance makes it more technical.
The foremost step is to select an automation tool that meets all the requirements of cross-browser testing. The next challenge comes as the expertise of testing and programming. Only expert testers and developers are allowed to write those test cases as incorrect test cases can produce inaccurate results that are not beneficial for your website.
So, to automate the test suites you should use the correct automation tool. You can use the Selenium suite as it provides 4 different tools – Webdriver, Integrated Development Environment (IDC), RC, and Grid. With proper knowledge, you can use this platform.
Invalid HTML and CSS
To design a website we use HTML and CSS languages. We have seen above that every browser has different rendering engines. Because of these engines, for different browsers, the parsing of the code that the developers write is also different. Not only you need to be extra cautious about writing perfect code with good editors, even some codes give no error but are not in accordance with W3C guidelines. This hence creates issues later on and web crawlers also ignore such websites. Browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox add <div> class automatically at the end of the code but not necessarily, other browsers have this function too.
To solve this problem, it is advised to use W3C validators that will verify and validate your code with proper testing.
Layout Compatibility
Every browser has its own layout format which it uses to fix the web page. But developers use the CSS reset and create their own layout design. This can create a compatibility issue as there are many different devices on which the user can access the website. It is important to check the responsiveness of the website.
Earlier, it was not possible to create a website that was compatible with mobile users. Today, we have wonderful efficient tools that check for responsiveness on hundreds of browsers. A cloud-based tool like LambdaTest can be used to check the responsiveness of the website or you can also go ahead with LT browser.
Older Browser Detection
We have seen that the browsers have a rendering engine and a JavaScript engine. Considering the necessity of JS, there is always a piece of JavaScript code on your website that adds great features to your website. These JS frameworks also get updated from time to time deprecating the old features and adopting newer ones with the new syntax. But the modern browsers update themselves with the new functionalities and cannot detect the older version on the website, this is why it becomes difficult for the browsers to load pages. This causes cross-browser compatibility issues and is a very common practical scenario.
This is why we should always detect whether the browser is up-to-date.
CONCLUSION
Cross-browser testing is a very important process behind the success of a web page or website. Avoiding CBT can cause low revenue and customer loss. But only the developers and the testers know how challenging it is to implement it.
LambdaTest- a cloud-based automation tool is your one platform solution to overcome all the cross-browser testing difficulties. LambdaTest offers a wide range of functionalities such as:
- Integration with a combination of over 2000+ browsers, OS, and devices for cross-browser testing.
- Supports screenshot and video recording features.
- It is available with an automated Selenium Grid that is used to run CBT smoothly.
- Provides parallel test execution.
- We can test our website for responsiveness using this tool.
And a lot more. You can visit our official site www.lambdatest.com to check out other features as well.
Hope this article helped you in any possible way!
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