This article explains how to do cross-browser testing: how to choose which browsers and devices to test, how to actually test those browsers and devices, and how to test with user groups.Prerequisites: Familiarity with the core HTML, CSS, and JavaScript languages; an idea of the high-level principles of cross-browser testing. Objective: To gain an understanding of the high-level concepts involved in cross-browser testing.
Since you can't test every combination of browser and device, it's enough that you ensure your site works on the most important ones. In practical applications, "important" often means "commonly used among the target audience."
You can classify browsers and devices by the amount of support you intend to give. For example:
In the following sections, we'll build up a support chart in this format.
Note: Yahoo first made this approach popular, with their Graded browser Support approach.
This typically involves making educated guesses based on user demographics. For example, suppose your users are in North America and Western Europe:
A quick online search tells you that most people in North America and Western Europe use Windows or Mac desktops/laptops, where the main browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. You'd probably want to just test the latest versions of these browsers, as these browsers get regular updates. These should all go in the A-grade tier.
Most people in this demographic also use either iOS or Android phones, so you'd probably want to test the latest versions of iOS Safari, the last couple of versions of the old Android stock browser, and Chrome and Firefox for iOS and Android. You should ideally test these on both a phone and a tablet, to ensure responsive designs work.
Opera Mini isn't very capable of running complex JavaScript, so we should put this into grade B as well.
Thus, we've based our choice of which browsers to test on the browsers that we expect our users to use. This gives us the following support chart so far:
If your target audience is mostly located somewhere else, then the most common browsers and OSs may differ from the above.
Note: "The CEO of my company uses a Blackberry, so we'd better make sure it looks good on that" can also be something to consider.
Some websites show which browsers are popular in a given region. For example, Statcounter gives an idea of trends in North America.
A much more accurate source of data, if you can get it, is an analytics app like Google Analytics, which tells you exactly what browsers people are using to browse your site. Of course, this relies on you already having a site to use it on, so it isn't good for completely new sites.
You may also consider using open-source and privacy-focused analytics platforms like Open Web Analytics and Matomo. They expect you to self-host the analytics platform.
</body> tag, or somewhere else appropriate that keeps it from getting muddled up with your application code.That's it! Your site should now be ready to start reporting analytics data.
Now you should be able to go back to the Analytics Web homepage, and start looking at the data you've collected about your site (you need to leave a little bit of time for some data to actually be collected, of course.)
By default, you should see the reporting tab, like so:
There is a huge amount of data you could look at using Google Analytics — customized reports in different categories, etc. — and we haven't got time to discuss it all. Getting started with Analytics provides some useful guidance on reporting (and more) for beginners.
You can see what browsers and operating systems your users are using by selecting Audience > Technology > Browser & OS from the left-hand menu.
Note: When using Google analytics, you need to beware of misleading bias, e.g., "We have no Firefox Mobile users" might lead you to not bother supporting Firefox mobile. But you are not going to have any Firefox Mobile users if the site was broken on Firefox mobile in the first place.
You should include accessibility as a grade A testing requirement.
Also, you should be aware of situation-specific needs. For example, if your product targets a market where mobile phones are the primary means of accessing the internet, you will probably want to make mobile browser support a priority.
So, our final support chart will end up looking like so:
When you've got a new addition to your codebase that needs testing, before you start testing you should write out a list of testing requirements that need to pass to be accepted. These requirements can be visual or functional — both combine to make a usable website feature.
Consider the following example (see the source code, and also the example running live):
Test criteria for this feature could be written like so:
A and B grade:
A-grade:
You might notice that the button isn't usable with only the keyboard. We could remedy this using JavaScript to implement a keyboard control for the toggle, or use some other approach.
These test criteria are useful, because:
One option for carrying out browser tests is to do the testing yourself. To do this, you will probably use a combination of actual physical devices, and emulated environments (using either an emulator or a virtual machine).
It is generally better to have a real device running the browser you want to test — this provides the greatest accuracy in terms of behavior and overall user experience. You'll probably want something like the following, for a reasonable low-level device lab:
The following are also good options, if you can get them:
Your main work machine can also be a place to install other tools for specific purposes, such as accessibility auditing tools, screen readers, and emulators/virtual machines.
Some larger companies have device labs that stock a very large selection of different devices, enabling developers to hunt down bugs on very specific browser/device combinations. Smaller companies and individuals are generally not able to afford such a sophisticated lab, so tend to make do with smaller labs, emulators, virtual machines, and commercial testing apps.
We will cover each of the other options below.
Note: Some efforts have been made to create publicly accessible device labs — see Open Device Labs.
Note: We also need to consider accessibility — there are a number of useful tools you can install on your machine to facilitate accessibility testing, but we'll cover those in the Handling common accessibility problems article, later in the course.
Emulators are basically programs that run inside your computer and emulate a device or particular device conditions of some kind, allowing you to do some of your testing more conveniently than having to find a particular combination of hardware/software to test.
An emulator might be as simple as testing a device condition. For example, if you want to do some quick and dirty testing of your width/height media queries for responsive design, you could use Firefox's Responsive Design Mode. Safari has a similar mode too, which can be enabled by going to Safari > Preferences, and checking Show Develop menu, then choosing Develop > Enter Responsive Design Mode. Chrome also has something similar: Device mode (see Simulate Mobile Devices with Device Mode).
More often than not though, you'll have to install some kind of emulator. The most common devices/browsers you'll want to test are as follows:
You can often find simulators for other mobile device environments too, for example:
Note: Many emulators actually require the use of a virtual machine (see below); when this is the case, instructions are often provided, and/or use of the virtual machine is incorporated into the installer of the emulator.
Virtual machines are applications that run on your desktop computer and allow you to run emulations of entire operating systems, each compartmentalized in its own virtual hard drive (often represented by a single large file existing on the host machine's hard drive). There are a number of popular virtual machine apps available, such as Parallels, VMware, and Virtual Box; we personally like the latter, because it is free.
Note: You need a lot of hard disk space available to run virtual machine emulations; each operating system you emulate can take up a lot of memory. You tend to choose the hard drive space you want for each install; you could get away with probably 10GB, but some sources recommend up to 50GB or more, so the operating system will run reliably. A good option provided by most virtual machine apps is to create a dynamically allocated hard drive that grows and shrinks as the need arises.
To use a Virtual Box, you need to:
Now the new virtual box should appear in the left-hand menu of the main Virtual Box UI window. At this point, you can double-click to open it — it will start to boot up the virtual machine, but it won't yet have the operating system (OS) installed. At this point you need to point the dialog box at the installer image/disk, and it will run through the steps to install the OS just like on a physical machine.
Warning: You need to make sure you have the operating system image you want to install on the virtual machine available at this point, and install it right away. If you cancel the process at this point, it can render the virtual machine unusable, and make it so you need to delete it and create it again. This is not fatal, but it is annoying.
After the process has completed, you should have a virtual machine running an operating system inside a window on your host computer.
You need to treat this virtual operating system installation just like you would any real installation — for example, as well as installing the browsers you want to test, install an anti-virus program to protect it from viruses.
Having multiple virtual machines is very useful, particularly for Windows IE/Edge testing — on Windows, you are not able to have multiple versions of the default browser installed side by side, so you might want to build up a library of virtual machines to handle different tests as required, e.g.:
Note: Another good thing about virtual machines is that the virtual disk images are fairly self-contained. If you are working on a team, you can create one virtual disk image, then copy it and pass it around. Just make sure you have the required licenses to run all those copies of Windows or whatever else you are running if it is a licensed product.
As mentioned in the last chapter, you can take a lot of the pain out of browser testing by using some kind of automation system. You can set up your own testing automation system (Selenium being the popular app of choice), which does take some setup, but can be very rewarding when you get it worked out.
There are also commercial tools available such as Sauce Labs and Browser Stack that do this kind of thing for you, without you having to worry about the setup, if you wish to invest some money in your testing.
Another alternative is to use no-code test automation tools such as Endtest.
We will look at how to use such tools later on in the module.
Before we move on, we'll finish this article off by talking a bit about user testing — this can be a good option if you have a willing user group to test your new functionality on. Bear in mind that this can be as lo-fi or as sophisticated as you like — your user group could be a group of friends, a group of colleagues, or a group of unpaid or paid volunteers, depending on whether you have any money to spend on testing.
Generally, you'll get your users to look at the page or view containing the new functionality on some kind of a development server, so you are not putting the final site or change live until it is finished. You should get them to follow some steps and report the results they get. It is useful to provide a set of steps (sometimes called a script) so that you get more reliable results pertaining to what you were trying to test. We mentioned this in the What are you going to test section above — it is easy to turn the test criteria detailed there into steps to follow. For example, the following would work for a sighted user:
When running tests, it can also be a good idea to:
These steps are designed to make sure that the browser you are testing in is as "pure" as possible, i.e., there is nothing installed that could affect the results of the tests.
Note: Another useful lo-fi option, if you have the hardware available, is to test your sites on low-end phones/other devices — as sites get larger and feature more effects, there is a higher chance of the site slowing down, so you need to start giving performance more consideration. Trying to get your functionality working on a low end device will make it more likely that the experience will be good on higher-end devices.
Note: Some server-side development environments provide useful mechanisms for rolling out site changes to only a subset of users, providing a useful mechanism for getting a feature tested by a subset of users without the need for a separate development server. An example is Django Waffle Flags.
After reading this article you should now have a good idea of what you can do to identify your target audience/target browser list, and then effectively carry out cross-browser testing on that list.
Next, we'll turn our attention to the actual code issues your testing might uncover, starting with HTML and CSS.