The Ultimate Guide To Successful Cross-Browser Testing

As the online environment is ever-evolving, with newer versions and browsers always coming in, Cross-browser testing is one area you must ensure around, making sure your online apps provide a consistent user experience across a range of platforms and browsers.

Today, we will touch on a few of the complexities associated with cross-browser testing so that you have all the information and also techniques required to be successful in this vital part of web development.

Importance of Cross-Browser Testing

In an ideal world, web developers should only have to create websites or online apps once with the most minimal amount of hassle across even open-source browsers like Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Safari – but the opposite is true because each web browser renders and interprets online pages.

These discrepancies in look and performance can prevent your website or web application from providing the best possible experience for users. To cope with this, there are cross-browser testing tools that help accelerate the web development process.

Problems Related To Cross-Browser Compatibility

Cross-browser testing ensures that your entire web content looks and works similar in all browsers, versions, and devices. There are a variety of factors play into compatibility, such as rendering engines, JavaScript support, CSS compatibility requirements and HTML standards compliance and they all need to be accounted for when doing cross-browser testing.

Webapps have to battle this mobile browser ecosystem, as each mobile browser comes in different shapes & sizes, with different levels of capabilities & limitations, affecting the speed, user experience, computing power, & screen size-to-height ratio that the webapps have to navigate through as well.

Cross-Browser Testing Features And Why It Matters

Cross-browser compatibility can spell doom for your online project and testing must always be included in its FW plan.

Here are some reasons as to why you should perform cross-browser testing;

USABILITY: Your website probably has visitors using different browsers, functionality is faulty or it shows improperly in the browser of your visitor; it may ruin his experience and confuse them away from your brand leaving a bad name to your business.

Browser Market Share: Browsers have different shares based on geography and demography; ignoring the less popular browsers can cost you most of the audience.

SEO – Search engines such as Google consider site compatibility and accessibility when ranking sites, so if your site experience is bad in a particular browser, you could harm your SEO rankings.

Impact on Business: The consequences of cross-browser compatibility issues can cause fatal results for any web business; bounce rate can rise, conversion can drop, and revenue can fall. You can then become a more lucrative and successful overall web business by taking steps to rectify them.

Cross-Browser Testing Process

An organized method should be followed to accomplish cross browser testing and here is a temper which will help you with this process step-by-step:

1. Choose Your Target Browsers As First Step Based on User Data Analysis and Market Share Number, choose the browsers and versions you want to support.
2. Create a High-Level Test Plan: In your plan, detail everything related to web application testing efforts — scenarios, cases and all behavioural predictions for browsers.
3. Choose the Right Testing Tools: There are several tools and service providers, for example, LambdaTest, CrossBrowserTesting, Sauce Labs, and BrowserStack that can help in performing cross-browser testing. All three will likely be very useful resources.

These platforms give you the ability to test your web app on multiple browsers and devices, all without requiring you to configure your own physical environments.

4. Automated testing: Automated cross-browser testing applications (Selenium WebDriver, Puppeteer or Playwright apps, etc.) boost the speed of the test execution and enforce the evenness of the test run over the browsers. Testing it is easy while doing it fast too!
5. Manual Testing: Manual testing is an integral part of automated testing; it allows testers to reveal visual bugs and functional errors that automation tests cannot detect. Use diverse people in your testing group because people experience products from different angles and view points.
6. Test for Browser Addon Compatibility: Some addons in the browser like ad blockers, security tools, etc. can break the functionality or appearance of your web app. Before your online app works, these extensions should be activated.
7. Simulate the Mobile Devices: You can use device simulators or browser emulators for mobile device testing to make it analogous with the experience of consumers on smartphones and tablets. Identify touch interactions, responsive designs, etc.
8. Performance for Cross-Browser Testing As with any other site testing, performance evaluations have to be done across browsers, to ensure that there are no bottlenecks that negatively impact the user experience in that browser, such as page load times, rendering speeds, responsiveness rates, and so on.
9. Debugging and issue tracking: Bug Report Template Especially, once problems arise through the specific testing type browser version number steps taken to reproduce and replicate the issue systematic format; Use browser/testing system debugging tools make it efficient;
10. Iterative Testing: Frequent iterations to cross-browser testing are what it is all about. Check your testing plan from time to time, update list of target browsers whenever needed, and retest your web app frequently to keep it compatible with the challenges at both browser and operating system levels.

As per web development, never underestimate cross-browser testing. Consistency is a priority to meet business goals and deliver excellent user experiences, and the fact that your app is running consistently across browsers and devices is a must.

A well-planned cross-browser compatibility testing involves having a structured testing approach, choosing the right testing tools and resources, and a commitment to continuous tracking and improvement of cross-browser testing results in higher customer delight, traffic growth, and improved business outcomes.

Also Read : What Makes Software Testing Critical For Automation Success?