Cross-browser testing is a type of software testing where testers assess the compatibility and functionality of a website or web application across various web browsers, platforms, and versions. It rose from the inherent differences in popular web browsers (such as Chrome, Firefox, or Safari) in terms of their rendering engines, HTML/CSS support, JavaScript interpretation, and performance characteristics, leading to inconsistencies in user experience.
Cross browser testing gives insights for developers to eliminate that inconsistency and bring a standardized experience, no matter what browsers the users choose to access their website/web application.
A common misconception about cross browser testing is that it only involves testing on a few different browsers, while in reality it is a much more comprehensive term if we take into account the number of versions of those browsers, operating systems, and devices. A different combination of them provides a different experience. At the time of this article, there are:
Together, they create about 63000+ possible browser - device - OS combinations that testers must consider when performing cross browser testing. The sheer number of combinations to be tested makes full browser coverage quite an ambitious task, so QA professionals tend to limit their tests to only the combinations most relevant to their business. Some companies employ automation testing to expand their browser coverage, which involves leveraging top automation testing tools.
In this article, we will delve into the concepts of cross-browser testing, explore its process, and discover how QA professionals can overcome challenges in cross-browser testing.
As we have demonstrated above, there are currently thousands of possible browser - device - OS combinations that make web browsing an incredibly diverse and personalized experience. Many businesses only test their website on Google Chrome, but Chrome only accounts for 63.45% of the browser market share as of Apr 2023, so we risk not testing the web experience of nearly 40% of the users. Users can access your websites using many other browsers/devices, and without cross browser testing, we don’t know if the website functions consistently on them.
There are many ways browsers can impact the web experience:
There are many potential issues that can occur without cross browser testing. Below are some examples of them, and it could be happening without you knowing:
The QA team needs to prepare the list of items they want to check in their cross browser compatibility testing.
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Considering the variety of browsers, versions, and platforms available, it is a daunting task for any tester to do the browser selection. More importantly, testers usually don’t have access to the right data to make this decision; instead, it is the client, business analysis team, and marketing teams that play a significant role.
Companies must collect usage and traffic data to identify the most commonly used browsers, environments, and devices. The testing team only serves as an advisor in this phase, and once the final choice has been made they can start evaluating the application's performance across multiple browsers.
Once the testing has been done and defects are found, the design and development teams interpret the results and make respective adjustments on the visual elements and the code base.
Cross browser testing should be performed continuously along the development roadmap to ensure the proper functioning of new features and prevent any disruptions in previously functional elements caused by new code additions (also known as regression testing).
Delaying cross browser testing until the project's end really escalates the complexity and cost of addressing any identified issues compared to resolving them incrementally during development. Acknowledging this, many QA teams have adopted the shift left testing strategy to essentially integrate all testing activities into development workflows, facilitating more comprehensive quality management.
The cross browser testing and bug fixing workflow for a project can be roughly divided into 6 following phases (which is in fact the Software Testing Life Cycle that can be applied to any type of testing):
1. Requirement Analysis
2. Test Planning
3. Environment Setup
4. Test Case Development
5. Test Execution
6. Test Cycle Closure
During the initial planning phase, many discussions with the client or the business analyst occur to determine precisely what aspects to be tested. All of the requirements for testing along with detailed information on availability of resources and schedules are outlined in a test plan. It's ideal if we can test the entire application on all browsers, but be mindful of time and cost limitations. One effective strategy is to conduct 100% testing on 1 major browser, then test only the most critical and commonly used features for other browsers.
Once the required feature set and preferred technologies are identified, we can start to analyze the target audience's browsing habits, devices, and other relevant factors. Existing client data or external sources such as competitor usage statistics and geographic considerations can aid in this assessment.
Let’s consider an eCommerce site catering to North American customers. Based on the data collected from traffic analytics, this website should:
Having determined the target testing platforms, it is necessary to revisit the feature requirements and technology choices as outlined in the test plan.
We can manually test the website on different browsers simply by opening up the desired browser and accessing the web from there. Testers have to repeat the test cases on several browsers to see how the application behaves and report any bugs they find. Despite being a straightforward method, manual testing is prone to human errors and time-consuming. In the long run, manual cross browser testing is not scalable.
Automated cross browser testing involves using tools to create and execute repetitive test cases to improve test consistency, efficiency, and accuracy. QA teams have 2 options between build vs buy: either they build a fully customized tool in-house from scratch or buy a tool from a vendor. No matter which option they choose, a good cross browser testing tool should:
The decision on if your team should choose manual testing vs automated testing depends on the specific test project. For the sake of simplicity, you should only automate repetitive tests and manually perform ad-hoc, exploratory, usability tests.
Environment setup is a huge challenge for cross browser testers because investing in physical machines is extremely costly. You need to have at least 1 Windows PC, Mac computer, Linux machine, iPhone, Android phone, iPad, Android tablet, and many other IoT devices if your product provides such integrations. Then consider the fact that you have to test not only the current but also many older versions of each of those machines, and the resources required to maintain the systems and keep them running. Managing test cases and test results on so many devices is a struggle when you have no centralized system connecting such different machines.
Testers need to consider several better approaches, and the 2 most common are:
For manual testing, testers can leverage AI-powered test case generation features in Katalon with JIRA integration. With the help of ChatGPT, we can streamline the process of creating test cases by automating the generation of well-organized, comprehensive, and accurate test cases using natural language inputs. This improves efficiency, reduces the need for manual work, and enhances the overall test case development process.
After integrating Katalon with JIRA, installing the Katalon - Test Automation for JIRA plugin, and configuring the API key, testers should see a “Katalon manual test cases” button in their JIRA ticket. As you click on this button, the Katalon Manual Test Case Generator will process your input, analyze the ticket title/description, and provide detailed manual test cases for you.
As you can see below, Katalon has generated 10 manual test cases for you within seconds, and you can easily save these test cases to the Katalon Test Management system, which helps you track their status in real-time.
For automation testing, you can leverage the Built-in Keywords and Record-and-Playback. The Built-in keywords are essentially prewritten code snippets that you can drag and drop to structure a full test case without having to write any code, while the Record-and-Playback simply records the actions on your screen and then turns those actions into an automated test script which you can re-execute on any browsers or devices you want.
If testers go for manual testing, they can simply open the browser and run the tests they have planned out, then record the results manually. If they choose automation testing, they can configure the environment they want to execute on then run the tests. In Katalon TestCloud, after constructing a test script, testers can easily select the specific combination they want to run the tests on.
Finally, testers return the results for the development and design team to start troubleshooting. After the development team has fixed the bug, the testing team must re-execute their tests to confirm that the bug has indeed been fixed. These results should be carefully documented for future reference and analysis.
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