You have a large number of browsers to choose from. Each has its own behavior and unique interpretation of the standards you’ve worked so hard to make sure your website conforms to. At least, that’s the way it used to be. It’s time for cross-browser testing.

The thing is, with all these browsers out there, how do you know which ones truly matter to your users? And it can change daily. You need a solution that keeps up with the boom and bust of browser popularity, and an easy way to determine how many tests you should run – simple so that you can get back to building your product faster.

Being compatible with multiple browsers is a necessary component for creating a successful website, particularly for large companies with a global market. If your website is not compatible with more than one browser, it is less likely to attract and retain customers from different cultures. A good cross-browser testing strategy will help you identify errors in all major browsers and make corrections before they can affect your bottom line.

What is cross-browser testing?

Cross-browser testing is the process of detecting differences in behaviors among various web browsers. It includes testing websites on different platforms and devices by using a variety of popular and new browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

It is a type of functional testing where you check whether your website works as intended when accessed through different combinations of browsers, operating systems, and devices. Browsers and devices keep increasing in number, with new ones popping up all the time. To deliver a consistent user experience across all browsers and devices, it’s vital that you cross-browser test your website.

With cross-browser tests, you can make sure that your website looks and functions as intended across different versions of popular browsers on different operating systems and devices. You can also check that your website is accessible to users with disabilities. Cross-Browser testing is more than a specialized type of testing, it’s a philosophy that strongly advocates that you ensure your sites work across all browsers, platforms, devices, and on different users.

By crafting a plan to test your site on multiple browsers, you’re actually establishing a quality baseline that enables you to detect mistakes at the earliest stage possible—before they are shipped to the end-user.

Cross-Browser testing is an effective method for ensuring that your web application/website is working properly across different browsers and/or operating systems.

Cross-browser testing is the process of testing a website or web application for its compliance with standards in multiple browsers and platforms. Cross-browser testing should be done to ensure that your browser-based application works with different platforms and all browsers. This will ensure the application is coded right, doesn’t have any lags and glitches and ultimately, the general result of your program’s mission is achieved.

The Cross Browser Testing software is a Microsoft Windows-based application that makes it possible to test an application on different web browsers and devices. It is compatible with most common web browsers and also comes with many built-in validation tools that make it simple to test your website.

Who uses cross-browser testing?

QA Engineers:

Cross-browser testing is usually performed by QA engineers. But, it’s important that everyone on the team be familiar with techniques, especially if they’re planning to do proactive testing within their own projects.

QA engineers will run a cross-browser test on your web application or site to check that it displays the same across multiple browsers. They will run it in both desktop and mobile browsers to ensure that your site looks great as visitors access it from different devices. They test web applications and sites to ensure that they work in various browsers and platforms. They report their findings, along with recommendations for improving the application or site, for the development team.

Web developers and designers use cross-browser testing tools to test if their project renders well in multiple browsers. Slow, unstable code can cause the web page to crash or otherwise malfunction. A web application may be broken because of improperly written code that does not display correctly on mobile devices with small screens.

Web developers

Using this approach, cross-browser tests are performed as the browser code is written and verified. This allows early identification of any incompatibilities between browsers and resulting corrective action. The approach is particularly useful when the application development cycle is iterative and agile in nature. It provides developers with confidence that their changing code will not break web application functions on the different browsers they support.

Instead of trying to test the application at the very end of the engineering process, cross-browser testing can take place regularly during development. This approach, also called full-stack web development, involves both the operation and development teams. Developers do not only verify whether a feature works correctly in their own browsers; they also perform cross-browser verification as they create elements of user interface and functionalities.

Conducting this kind of testing from “the inside” assures that many browser issues will be found and fixed early in the development process, minimizing testing costs in the end.

Advantages of cross-browser testing

Today the market is flooded with all sorts of browsers, each aiming to deliver you the best web browsing experience. But it is not at all easy to ensure that your website works on them all perfectly. Cross-browser testing brings in a new dimension to testing. It helps you to test your application over multiple browsers through automated tests.

This saves you from duplicate and repetitive tasks so that you can focus on developing more features for your product. Automation testing is a form of software testing in which the individual tests are automated scripts that execute all or a set of user actions.

When you configure automation testing in your QA strategy, you can easily and repeatedly test your website on different browsers, operating systems, and devices at a time of your choice. This helps teams to create and maintain a test suite that will help run automated functional tests across various browsers making cross-browser testing quite efficient.

Simultaneous execution of test cases will enable the test to run faster

Cross-browser testing is a powerful technique to test mobile applications in real scenarios by conducting UI and integration test cases on various device browsers. Parallel testing plays a key role in cross-browser testing while we can use multiple devices to run test cases on different browsers at the same time.

A number of test automation frameworks e.g., Appium, Robotium, etc have been introduced in the market up to provide a better cross-browser testing experience. It is a type of software testing that can increase the speed of overall testing. As browsers evolve and more devices hit the market, it becomes more difficult to ensure that the website performs across all major browsers and platforms.

Parallel cross-browser testing is a must if teams want to deliver exceptional levels of quality at speed. As manual testing can take up too much valuable time and resources, teams are turning to automated tools such as Appium or selenium web driver to achieve this without the need for a dedicated lab.

Cross-browser testing is the best practice to ensure an application works correctly across different browsers. As applications are being developed, it becomes very essential to test these applications on multiple browsers that the customers might be using.

One size doesn’t fit all

The majority of the sites are compatible with most popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome. But the fact is that all the users do not use these popular browsers. Hence it is necessary to test your website on lesser-used browsers as well. Testing different browsers involve zooming in, zooming out, and switching between browsers.

This is where a cloud-based cross-browser testing tool has an upper hand over on-premise solutions. The tester can easily access the cloud-based tool from anywhere and anytime, using any device with a browser. The testing costs will be more or less the same irrespective of whether you choose on-premises or cloud-based cross-browser testing.

Web apps nowadays need to be cross-browser compatible to ensure that it works on the most popular browsers. A simple mistake can cost you a fortune in terms of loss of business, thereby leading to huge monetary losses for your company. The need for cross-browser testing services can be easily covered by the cloud-based platform with changing the number of devices as per the project requirements.

By using cloud-based cross-browser testing, not only do you avoid the hassle of desktop devices but also achieve scalability and cost-effectiveness. Being scalable the solution can be adapted without delay, to any change in the project requirements or target audience. The cloud platform where the cross-browser testing tool is hosted can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

Testing any application on multiple browsers is a tedious process. To carry out this task, one needs to deploy the application on different browsers and check if it works or not. This process consumes a lot of time. But the advent of cloud computing solutions has made things easier for developers.

Higher test coverage

Automation Testing is one of the best methods for website testing across multiple browsers, platforms, and operating systems. Whether you are a small start-up or an enterprise giant with a large number of stakeholders dependent on successful cross-browser and cross-browser testing, automation can help you to deliver your project on time.

Automation testing is an automated software testing process in which a software application is tested by a special program to find bugs and errors. In this way, automation testing does not require a human to do repetitive and time-consuming tasks. After installation of the test environment, the settings are configured, you can run the tests before releasing it for live usage if any issue is found then fix it and start running tests again until it passes all the tests.

Automation testing saves a good amount of testing time in many ways like one can automate all the repetitive tasks, which are generally done manually in manual testing. Automation also reduces many testing efforts, as it cuts down on repetitive test cases when they are stored separately in the automation database.

More accurate test results

Cross Browser Testing has two main approaches, parallel testing, and automation testing. The combination of these two techniques will enhance the speed of testing and reduce the effort that goes into it. Automation testing, also called scripted testing, is a collection of software tools that execute test scripts containing a sequence of tasks and assertions. In other words, it is the process of executing pre-determined sequences of instructions in order to test the software under test.

Automation testing uses frameworks in building automated tests to eliminate the need of writing code for every single test case one by one. The benefit is obvious, especially when there are repetitive tasks and regression testing needs to be performed multiple times.

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Author: Simon RobertEasyInfoBlog is a multi-author blog. We have experts and professionals in various fields who share their ideas and expert knowledge to help you with your daily information needs. Thanks for reading!