Are you a new tester fighting to grasp cross browser testing? We are here for you! Our article will help you understand all the important functions of cross-browser compatibility testing to ensure seamless functionality across different platforms.
Modern users can use multiple browsers to access your web apps. So, you must ensure the compatibility of your application on all these options. This is where cross-browser compatibility testing comes into action. It is a critical part of providing the same user interactions and experience across different browsers and platforms.
What is Cross-Browser Testing
Before you learn advanced cross-browser testing practices, let us take a step back. What is cross-browser testing? It is the process of comparing and verifying a web app’s functioning and design on multiple web browsers.
Why do you need cross-browser testing? To ensure that the website or web app behaves consistently and as per your expectations on different browser environments. To further understand the scope of cross-browser compatibility testing, let us go through some of the major benefits of this process:
- As we already stated earlier, different users prefer different browsers. So, you have to create an inclusive app development culture. For this, you must execute cross-browser compatibility testing on all your web applications.
- Modern users can access your web applications from various devices. These can include mobile phones, desktops, and even tablets. So, by implementing cross-browser compatibility testing on all these browsers, you can ensure a seamless experience on all the available options.
- We all know that different browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Edge have different market shares, and this share tends to change frequently. So, by ensuring compatibility across all these browsers, you can maximize the reach of your application and business practices.
- If you fail to provide consistent behavior across multiple browsers and the app crashes, it can send out a negative message about your development practices and business culture. For example, users might consider you unprofessional and stop using your applications permanently.
- Finally, providing a seamless user experience on multiple devices and browsers is one of the core building stones of creating a trustworthy business culture.
Major Challenges of Cross-Browser Testing
Before we start understanding the steps of executing cross-browser compatibility testing, let us go through some of the major challenges that you will face while implementing this process:
- Different browsers use different rendering engines for displaying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements. So, you must consider these differences while creating the test scripts for implementing cross-browser compatibility testing.
- Various studies show that almost 70% of the end users do not update their browsers ever. So, it is very important to consider these outdated browser versions while creating the cross-browser test cases. You must also remember that the modern features of your application might not be compatible with these versions.
- Similar to browser differences, there are also differences in the operating systems. These changes can affect the way in which browsers render your web pages.
- While implementing browser compatibility testing, you must ensure that you adopt a responsive design so that your application can automatically adjust to the varying display resolution and screen sizes depending on the device that the user is using.
- Finally, it is important to understand that different browsers have different performance characteristics. So, these characteristics will have a massive role in impacting the load times and the responsiveness of your web application due to the rendering process.
Steps to Implement Effective Cross-Browser Testing
Now that we have developed a very strong basic idea about cross-browser compatibility testing and its major challenges, let us go through some of those important steps the testers must adopt to execute this process:
- Begin the process by defining the list of your target browsers and platforms. If you are not sure about this process, you can conduct a quick survey of target end users and understand their preferences for creating the list. You can easily perform this process using any analytics tool available.
- Finished creating the list of your supported browsers and platforms? You have to make the decision if you want to perform automated cross-browser testing or stick to manual testing. Both have their own upsides and downsides.
- Automated cross-browser testing comes with a steep initial investment but massively boosts the efficiency and productivity. On the other hand, manual testing is low on investment but is prone to human errors and also takes a lot of time to complete the entire test cycle.
- Now you have to create a cross-browser testing plan, which will consist of the list of all your test cases, plans for executing responsive testing, and the test cases that you will be implementing to ensure the optimal performance of your application across multiple browsers and platforms.
- While executing cross-browser compatibility testing, you must also initiate real device testing to understand the influence of these parameters on physical devices. Since it is a very expensive process to set up a physical device lab, you can replace it with either virtual environments or cloud platforms.
- The final step in this process is to create the plans for debugging and troubleshooting. This is a very important process as it will help you to quickly find and remove the errors in the application infrastructure so that you can roll it out to the end users in time.
Popular Tools For Cross-Browser Testing
Let us now divert our attention towards some of the most popular tools for cross-browser testing. We have created this list to include all the tool options that are currently available in the market so that you can develop an inclusive idea about your available options:
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automated testing at scale with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. You can also verify the functioning of various application types like native apps, hybrid apps, mobile apps, and web apps.
LambdaTest also integrates parallel test execution with automated cross-browser testing to ensure that you can execute all the test cases simultaneously and wrap up the entire test suite within a fraction of the original time. It also provides a native bug tracker and test activity log so that you can track the current status of the application and all the errors in real-time and take immediate action.
After the test execution process, it generates a comprehensive test report consisting of various screenshots and videos so that you can easily track the faulty elements within the application infrastructure.
Selenium
Selenium is an automated test suite that allows you to execute automation testing on web applications. In this suite, you will find multiple separate tools. These tools will assist you at different stages of the application testing and development process.
The Selenium Grid is one such tool that comes under the Selenium suite, which helps you execute the test cases on multiple browsers and platforms at the same time. With this tool, you can also execute parallel testing by invoking the principle of a hub that is interacting with multiple nodes at the same time.
With Selenium, you can create automation test scripts in any of the popular programming languages based on your preferences.
Selenium supports various forms of testing, including life testing, automated testing, and visual testing. However, the massive drawback of Selenium is that it is only useful for web applications. This means you need to find an alternate solution for any other app type.
Best Practices For Cross-Browser Testing
Let us finally divert our attention toward some of the best practices that we highly recommend the testers integrate while executing cross-browser testing. These practices will not only streamline your development process but will also help you to utilize the full potential of your test environment:
- We highly recommend the testers to initiate cross-browser testing at the earlier stages of the development process. This approach will help you to catch issues before they become more complex and highly expensive in terms of time and resources.
- Since the application will go through frequent changes to add or remove features, it is important for the testers to execute browser compatibility testing at regular intervals. The primary goal of this process is to ensure that any new additions or removal of existing features do not affect the functioning of the core application infrastructure.
- It is important for the testers to focus on testing the critical functionalities and user flows at first. This is because, using this approach, the testers can ensure that at least the basic infrastructure of the application is available to the end-users at all instances. This is another important step towards ensuring that the application does not crash immediately after it has been deployed to end users.
- We recommend the testers to utilize modern frameworks and libraries for executing and assisting in cross-browser testing. This is because these libraries offer better cross-browser compatibility features and are regularly updated. Therefore, the testers can massively utilize these features to handle the changing requirements of modern browsers while ensuring an additional compatibility layer for outdated browser versions.
- Finally, we strongly recommend the testers to stay updated with all the changing trends and requirements in the browser industry. It is also important to have a quick idea about the upcoming browser versions so that you can ensure that your web app remains compatible with the latest releases. We also recommend that testers to sign up for beta programs so that they can test their application on these browser versions at the earlier stages.
The Final Verdict
Based on all the points that we stated in this article, we can come to the conclusion that cross-browser testing is an important practice in modern app development. It helps ensure that web apps provide a smooth user experience on multiple platforms and browsers.
By understanding the challenges of cross-browser testing, implementing the correct steps for the execution process, and following the best practices, testers can create robust and user-friendly web apps. These apps will have the ability to cater to a large section of end users without depriving anyone. Finally, with the evolution of the current web ecosystem, you must stay proactive and adapt to new technologies.
The implementation of this mindset is very important to maintain the cross-browser compatibility of your present applications and the ones that you are going to develop in the coming years.
