I'm looking for an offline software that can speed up the testing of a website in different browsers.
Yes, I can install Opera, Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari and test in each one, but this slow down the process because there are a lot of changes to be done in the website I am working and each change must be tested in all browsers.
More specifically, I am looking for something similar to IETester, but for different browsers. I'm not interested in online services (there are a lot), but offline.
So, someone knows something like this?
I find the Selenium tool [ http://seleniumhq.org/ ] very useful for such needs:
there are drivers for almost all modern and not-so-modern browsers: firefox, IE, Opera, Chrome, Safari..
scales quite well through the webdriver thing (remote control execution of tests on many different hosts), and
is well established: there are many resources available around to develop and deploy it.
Main drawback, as for my own experience: the learning curve is somewhat tough.
There is also a nice test management tool especially targeted at Selenium: Bromine (disclaimer: I did not yet use Bromine, but saw great comments on it).
Regards,
--
boris
Adobe BrowserLab for Desktop Browsers (Free) As noted in the comments, this has been discontinued. But they recommend Sauce labs, and Browser Stack instead.
Adobe Edge Inspect aka Shadow is also available and does all the above quite well. It is primarily for Mobile Browser testing and debugging.
Microsoft's Expression Suite also has its own Cross-Browser Testing utility, called Expression Web Super-Preview.
In Microsoft's words,
You can view browser renderings side-by-side horizontally or
vertically, or overlay them to identify differences. You can use
rulers and guides to measure and highlight visual problems. You can
zoom in and out of a page and see all the browser renderings update in
tandem.
You can try BrowseEmAll (http://www.browseemall.com) which is a desktop application for windows (and sadly windows online).
Still it contains all major browsers and simulators for iOS and Android which should make the testing easier than switching between different browsers manually.
If you like groovy, then try Spock.
I've experimented with Spock and Gem for BDD tests.
Related
Over 2 years I tested web application with help Selenium framework. I know the best design is testing on VM.
The only one downside of this - it's very slow testing. Why?
browser only gets so much memory, if you will run several instances.
site coud be very slow.
connections can be very slow.
Would be great if there was a framework that emulated the browser (engine/core) correctly and can provide some results (api) for surf on the page.
I don't mean to simulate just on the one browser with different version (like IE). I mean to simulate for all browsers with very popular and newest version.
Does anyone know a framework/tool that can do it?
Thank you.
You can try PhantomJS for example.
From their page:
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and
native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector,
JSON, Canvas, and SVG.
You can use it in combination with Jasmine (as well as several other frameworks) for testing.
However the selection of available engines is limited to WebKit. I doubt that Selenium will be easy to replace. By the way it looks like Selenium will probably become a W3C standard over the next years.
You can also run Selenium with Xvfb - I use it to execute test on remote server and it is going very well.
I have been looking around stackoverflow for automated GUI tools for testing our web app gui from a Business analyst point of view, so that means strictly requirements-record-playback kind of testing since we are not really programmers.
We have used selenium in the past but unfortunately it is no longer compatible with Firefox 4.
Is there a similar tool to selenium that allows recording and playback of GUI tests that does not require a lot or any scripting on a windows platform? thanks
You can use the FireFox add on compatibility reporter to get Selenium working on FF4
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/
Or alternatively drop down to FireFox 3.x and use that just for your testing!
For the server component Selenium-RC (necessary to execute tests), You must run Selenium-RC 2.0b3 (or higher if it become) to be compatible with Firefox 4. I have used it succesfully with FF4.
Selenium IDE, the recording tool, for firefox is indeed not available as a plugin for FF4 (but I speculate it will be coming soon).
I think that you can benefit from AutoIt (http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) I`d been using it to test Windows based GUI, but to the best of knowledge there are lot of scripts to test/play on-line games, thus it is applicable to Web Sites.
It does not require deep technical knowledge, but of course it will be much better and frequently mandatory to optimize the generated code. I`ve started my experience with this tool, and I was doing my work flawlessly.
At one company, I was developing automated tests for web app by means of TestPartner (Compuware company) it was one of the best tools Ive ever worked with, it generates VB code quite 'intelligently' and supports user with administration features. But Im not sure whether it is possible to use it without paying.
Good luck !
Do you test your applications under multiple browser settings? Do you use test tools that tell you why your site might be problematic?
Firefox has very useful WebDeveloper add-on. Lets you disable/enable various features of the browser on the fly. You can check how will your app work with cookies disabled or in 800x600 etc.
Besides testing various resolutions I also test with different DPI I've found its common for offices to use 120dpi on their workstations which can break sites in IE especially.
Color usage for the color blind: http://vischeck.com/
We use a couple of different machine images with IE6/IE7/IE8 FF2/FF3 Chrome, Opera & Safari for windows installed on them.
For developers, most have IE7 & Firefox installed. The Firefox Web Developer Add-in is handy. As is FireBug, Y-Slow & HTTPFox.
We'll target most sites to 1024*768 and then test to see they look fine #
1280*1024
1280*768
1920*1080
1920*1200
For simple UI Interaction, we've used Selenium in the past for automated/macro testing
I usually test pages with designs which are critical for browser-compatibility in browsershots. Try it yourself: browsershots.org
If my app has been tested in Firefox 3, Safari 3 & IE 7 will it need additional testing for Chrome?
If there are areas that'll need further testing -- then are there any online guides I could share with my designers & developers?
At what point will Chrome be considered to have sufficient market share to be treated as a mainstream browser?
If it's working fine on Safari, it will probably work on Chrome as well. The only difference is the JavaScript engine, but I've yet to see a real world example of some legitim JavaScript code not working on Chrome.
Personally I test my stuff with Chrome because I use Chrome intensively for development. It is good practice to test your pages with at least one WebKit (or KHTML) based browser though.
Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is also used in Safari and some other small browsers. Overall with both Chrome and Safari gaining in market share it is definately a browser to test (you only really need to test one). It's very standards compliant and is constantly having updates to keep up with new CSS drafts.
Webkits main Site - http://webkit.org/
Browser Market Share
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers are good places to look for market share of browsers although they show very different responses on Chrome.
According to Wikipedia roughly 7.96% of poeple are using WebKit based browsers however W3C shows that in November only 5.8% did.
Theoretically, because Google Chrome uses the same engine as Safari (WebKit), you've already tested. But Google has made several changes to the engine, including rewriting the JavaScript interpreter completely. Additional testing never hurts and it wouldn't take long to confirm that everything works as expected.
Now that GMail suggests people switch from IE to Firefox and Chrome, I'm guessing we'll see IE lose more and more market share to those browsers. Chrome doesn't have much of a user-base now, but I can imagine that will change.
Better test on it. I've already run across sites that work in Safari but don't in Chrome. I have IE8b2, FF3, Safari, and Chrome all installed on my machine. Not for testing reasons, but because of the websites that I visit. Takes all 4 of those to get all the websites to show right...
if you don't have PNG24 with opacity changed from CSS, all things should be fine.
However, i always try in all modern browsers (ie6/7, ff2/3, opera 9.x, safari and chrome).
According to Wikipedia, Chrome has a 0.78% usage rate right now. Depending on your audience the actual number of users might be low, and not really require testing.
Chrome uses the WebKit engine, which as I recall is the same engine used by Safari. So in theory, if your site works for Safari it should work for Chrome, as well.
Refer to this Google's Chrome page for details.
Chrome already got a small percentage of the community. However as far as I know, Chrome follows the standards from W3C and all websites that work in IE6, IE7 and FF2 / 3 has worked perfectly for me.
So by that said, i think you should already be testing your applications in chrome as well.
Always test in these browsers nowdays:
Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8
Firefox 2, 3
Chrome
Opera
Safari
Lynx
Tools like Selenium are good for testing user interactions on the web UI. However, I was curious what are people approaches for strictly testing and verifying that web pages are rendered correctly across a set of browsers?
Is this even possible?
May I recommend browsershots where you can submit pages and have them rendered out in a variety of browsers with various things set on or off such as Flash and JavaScript. At the end of the day you will still want to install FF, IE6-8, Opera and Safari/Chrome for testing manually. Also, if you've got a friend with a Mac (or a PC if you're using a Mac) get them to test in Safari too as I've personally found differences in the way both of them render the same page.
I'd also recommend that you develop mainly in Firefox and regularly check it in IE6 as you work. IE6 is the one that will mostly screw up so if it's working in both it's more likely to be working in all.
When you find rendering weirdness try and fix it in your markup and CSS first before resorting to CSS hacks as they can lead to 'interesting' problems later or in other browsers.
There is only a handful of browsers you need to test, as some share a common rendering engine (Gecko or Webkit). Without explaining which or why, here's the current wisdom (2009):
Build your site using Firefox or Opera (on any platform). BTW Opera uses its own Presto engine;
Test in whichever of the above you didn't use.
Validate the (X)HTML and CSS (important!).
Test it in >=IE7 and note the glitches, if any.
Use conditional comments in separate stylesheets for each version IE - never use CSS hacks as they'll go out of date.
Test in IE <7 if you like and do the same, or use conditional comments to ask users (politely) to upgrade their version of IE.
Test in Safari (Webkit).
Don't test in Chrome, you already have by proxy (Webkit)!
Don't test in IE for Mac - the share is too low and it's no longer updated.
Finally, try enlarging the text in Firefox, Opera, IE and Safari. Opera also has a hand-held emulation mode for mobiles.
You will have now covered (theatrical guess) 99.9% of browser setups. If you're on OS X or Linux, you can run Windows in a virtual environment like Parallels or Wine. Apparently Wine also has a Windows binary, but I couldn't find it. Caution: you'll need to be sure that your virtual environment allows IE to read conditonal comments.
In practice, I find that if a site has valid code and works in Firefox, Safari and Opera, it'll probably be okay in IE7 up. The only HTML/CSS gotcha is IE's 'haslayout' handling. If you don't have the browsers, BrowserStack is an excellent online testing service.
Finally, if you're using Javascript, you'll need to go through a similar process, problem being that as a rapidly developing area, newer versions of some browsers handle Javascript in increasingly effective ways, so functions in older versions might break or fail quietly.
If you just want to see if layout is correct, just submit your website to BrowserShots.org and visit later to see the screenshots.
If you want to test the functionality (JavaScript, etc.) then you'll need to test manually.
Manually?
I do not see an alternative if you want strict testing. Just install as many different browsers as possible and test in all of them. Of course this includes different versions of most popular browsers, and you need to check on Windows, Linux and Macintosh.
Previously I was use WM for different versions of IE, but I find out some new tool for testing layout, and UI as well with this tool, link for FF use fire bug extension, those tools are for manually testing.