These days, thousands of websites and applications are created daily, and most of them fail to work because of compatibility issues, poor responsiveness, and alignment issues. It indicates how important cross-browser testing is for developing a completely working website.
QA’s and developers from various organizations need to re-analyze the best practices of cross-browser testing and hunt for more suitable alternatives to regularly keep cross-browser testing up to the mark.
This article will discuss some best practices for cross-browser testing to help bypass all the issues restricting the application’s timely release. While discussing that, we will also see what cross-browser testing is, why it is important to perform, and its benefits. Let’s get started.
Cross-browser testing
Cross-browser testing is the process that ensures that web-based applications will work properly in a variety of different web browsers. It is developed to ensure that applications built in one browser are consistent with others. Cross-browser testing will determine if there are problems causing content across different browsers, like a feature available in the modernized browsers may not render in older browsers.
cross-browser testing verifies that the appearance of a web page differs from one browser to another, and demonstrates that the app under test functions as expected in all browsers being tested.
In short, the website or app is visible or not the way you intended it to be visible.
In short, cross browser testing is done to recognize the broken functionality of a site and identify the usability problems caused by an incompatible browser or browser version. Additionally, it enhances the way the web app or website renders the page to ensure a favorable user experience.
Why is cross-browser testing important?
Everyone is not using the same web browser, according to the latest statistics on Wikipedia for usage share of all browsers, desktop browsers, mobile browsers, and tablet browsers. That causes the business to risk losing clients because one browser version looks terrible.
In the 21st century, when some web app is opened, and it looks bad, users just go back to Google and open another one until they find a good-looking one. There are possibilities that users may not be able to use the current version of the application they are provided with, despite everything being good in it.
Every part of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS is unique in various browsers; some properties can be supported in one browser but not in the others. Performing cross-browsing testing allows its developer to pinpoint browser-specific compatibility errors so that they can be debugged quickly.
It also ensures that developers are not separating a significant part of their target users, simply because the website is not compatible with their browser operating system. HTML and CSS are standards designed to work in all web browsers. Their simple markup rules tell a browser how to behave when it receives a set of instructions.
However, with the latest browser versions, there are still many possibilities for incompatible HTML and CSS rules and frameworks that can destroy user experience. Discrepancies in the way that code is analyzed are particularly true of older web browsers.
Benefits of cross-browser testing
Productive user experience: Cross-browser testing ensures the website or application performs consistently well across all browsers and devices, resulting in a positive user experience.
Improved conversion rates: Conversion rates will improve when a cross-browser test provides a more satisfactory user experience. If users trust a website with better cross-browser compatibility, they are likely to stay and engage.
Enhanced discoverability: For websites that execute poorly on specific browsers, increase their discoverability and organic search engine rankings by following cross-browser testing, also providing your site to perform nicely on almost various browsers or devices.
Customization for various platforms: For many browsers, certain features will only work with specific browsers, so cross-browser testing identifies specific features to enhance the user experience for these browsers.
Code updates and optimization: A cross-browser test recognizes issues and unpredictability in the code to various browsers, ensuring to update and optimize it.
Expense and time savings: Early detection of specific browser concerns during development and resolution will help to check potential customer complaints and bug reports, which saves time and resources in the long run.
Cross-browser testing best practices
Below we will discuss some best practices for cross-browser compatibility testing. Implementing these practices in mind will help developers in designing a website that is partially compatible even before testing.
Identifying target browsers
Decide which browsers are mostly used by your target audience. Concentrate on your testing efforts on these browsers to provide the best user experience for the majority of your visitors.
Ensuring uniform user experience
In a world where user retention hinges on mere seconds of loading time or the smoothness of an interface, ensuring that the website looks and feels consistent across all browsers is vital. Each web element like colors, fonts, animations, and layout, should render as intended to preserve brand integrity and user trust.
A responsive layout is more than just a site that adjusts to screen size. It’s about the site performing optimally on a desktop in Firefox, a tablet in Safari, or a mobile in Chrome. It ensures that videos play, forms submit, and animations transition smoothly, irrespective of the platform.
Choosing the best UI test frameworks
Choosing an appropriate UI testing framework is the next thing that needs to be considered. A UI testing framework can make the entire browser testing easy and seamless to design high-performance applications. Selecting a framework by analyzing and understanding the testing and team’s needs is always recommendable.
Addressing browser-specific bugs and quirks
With the best coding practices, browser-specific bugs can be seen easily. It might be because CSS is not being applied correctly. Rather than waiting to report issues that can harm a brand’s image, cross-browser testing allows developers and designers to carefully identify and fix the problems, ensuring a seamless user journey.
Documenting and tracking issues: Keep a detailed record of cross-browser compatibility issues and their resolutions. It will help the teammates to address similar issues in the future and hold a high level of consistency.
Performing code validation
Code validation ensures whether the code written by us is following the W3C standards or not. This is strongly important for a web developer. An authenticated and well-formatted website will not only make it browser-compatible but also provide a lot more freebies like improved search engine optimization for better traffic on the website, easy maintenance, etc.
For making the website cross-browser compatible, the code needs to be checked using validator tools. The text editors can highlight whether the code is compatible or not with the standards.
Regularly reviewing and updating
Stay updated about the current developments in web standards, browser updates, and best practices. Review frequently and update the testing procedures to remain effective in providing cross-browser compatibility.
Leveraging cross-browser testing tools
Give thought to using AI-powered testing platforms like LambdaTest, Appium, or Selenium. They allow the design and execution of test scripts across multiple browsers automatically, saving time and ensuring stability. They also provide access to various browser and operating system combinations, allowing testing proficiently without setting up multiple physical environments.
Skip unnecessary components
Sometimes, developers increase the complexities of their website without any end goal. For example, designing a lot of functionalities together creates congestion on the landing page. These unnecessary features are an enemy of cross-browser compatibility scenarios regarding landing pages. To simplify it, get the assistance of free landing page creators that let you build customized landing pages efficiently.
Tools for cross-browser testing
Testing the application in a single web browser is not enough most of the time, testing must be done on various browsers, and for that cross-browser testing tools are required to ensure that the web application is working fine across multiple browsers.
These tools are required when both server-side and client-side are accessing the web application in various web browsers.
Below are some of the essential tools for cross-browser testing that are already available to use.
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is a cloud-based AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated testing of both web and mobile applications at scale. The platform also allows testers to perform both real-time and automation testing on more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browser versions hosted on the cloud or on-premises.
The LambdaTest platform lets testers completely take advantage of their selenium testing scripts by using them on a scalable Selenium Grid for automatic testing. It includes live interactions and a one-click debugging aspect that can save testers time when testing a web application or website.
LambdaTest is highly conducive for flawless parallel testing, highly scalable, and equipped with high-end strategies that act as a catalyst in providing faster and high-quality outcomes for cross-browser testing. Its parallel testing support significantly reduces the testing cycles and improves application delivery efficiency.
It also provides a one-click bug logging feature to ensure logging a bug directly from the LambdaTest platform. It also integrates with multiple bug management tools like Jira, TeamWork, Asana, Github, Trello, and many more with a single click.
Selenium
Selenium is the most widely used cross-browser compatibility testing tool. It can be used across many devices including Android and Windows.It is an open-source test automation framework that automatically tests web-based apps on various platforms on almost all major browsers. It provides integrated support for multiple continuous integrations and delivery tools.
Additionally, it has great community support and unrestricted sources, and it’s designed for both operating and reversion testing, which makes it a strong powerful tool. Selenium WebDriver can be used for automation testing on Windows, Linux, or UNIX.
TestComplete
TestComplete is a commercial tool that enables GUI-based and scripted testing, has robust object recognition capabilities, and can be used for functional and regression testing. It can be difficult for those who are not experts in programming languages.
Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is one of the best cross-browser testing tools with an easy-to-use GUI. It provides support for Selenium WebDriver, Appium, and JavaScript code. Katalon Studio can execute tests on-premise or in the cloud and has a powerful API for automation testing. It works nicely with almost all the major browsers, and is compatible with multiple integration tools, and integrates well with other related software.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the web development field is constantly changing, so continuous learning and adaptation are some of the main keys to success.
Cross-browser testing plays an important role in developing high-performance applications and is an essential aspect of web development. It ensures that the web applications provide a consistent and delightful user experience across different browsers.
By following the above-mentioned best practices, proper planning and techniques can make the process simpler, faster, and qualitative. Planning for cross-browser testing initiates by re-evaluating the list of browsers, operating systems, devices, etc, and repeating the drill for regular intervals.
