Nowadays, the internet is accessed from different web browsers and devices. When you put your business online, you should begin by developing a website, and post-deployment, it should be accessible to everyone. In that case, users are free to access your website(s) across devices and screen sizes of their choice. The interface of the website and the user experience should generally be the same for all users, regardless of which device type they are using. This becomes possible only through effective cross-browser compatibility testing. This testing is a combination of manual and automation testing. To learn more about this and understand how this works, you should not miss out on reading this article carefully. So, let us now get started.
What is Cross-Browser Testing?
Cross-browser testing simply means thoroughly checking out a website not just on its expected functionality and performance on all devices of different screen sizes, but also on all varying types of web browsers. For a developer, just coding the website is not enough. The developer must also think that their users may access the website across many different devices including smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc. Thus, to have the best user experience, good coding must be responsive and should work under all the different web browsers.
Unlike the users, developers may be at the risk of underestimating their potential as users of their applications. In brief, they should not assume that the website will run properly on all the systems if it works just well on their system.
What are the various challenges faced by developers while ensuring consistent user experience?
Ensuring a consistent user experience for all the developers is not so easy. There are several challenges faced by the developers while coding the website. Let us explain some of them below:
Different Behaviour on Different Browsers: You will be surprised to learn that the same HTML and CSS code can perform differently on different browsers. For example, suppose any coder developed the website for a brand. This same website is performing perfectly in Google Chrome but has weird alignment or space issues when opened in Internet Explorer. This can be problematic for the coders to understand how to solve such scenarios.
Inconsistency with Different Rendering Engines: The web browsers use different rendering engines to display the websites. Sometimes, the CSS is not recognized properly by some of the rendering engines, changing the look of the website. For example, a website that appears perfectly fine with Mozilla Firefox’s Gecko engine can appear weird when rendered by the Webkit Engine of Safari. These issues are again, a huge trouble for the web developers to fix.
Responsiveness For All Screen Sizes: Sometimes, the functionality of the website gets complex. In such a situation, ensuring responsiveness for all screen sizes becomes a complex deal. Nowadays, more and more electronic display devices are coming out in the market, making the situation more demanding. The developers need to find out the best coding practices to solve this problem.
Legacy Compatibility: The older website browsers like Internet Explorer 11 are highly outdated and they don’t support the modern CSS or HTML rules. In such a situation, the users who still rely on these old websites can find the look and functionality of the websites to be deteriorated. So, the developers need to find an alternative solution to provide a better user experience even on those browsers.
User Expect a Lot: The users expect consistent behavior of the website on all screen sizes while they are connected to a brand. This can be challenging. Coding everything to be consistent on all the screen sizes is not possible for the developers all the time, especially for scenarios where documents are fetched from API and displayed on screens dynamically.
These are some of the challenges that make a consistent behavior of the website across all the websites a bit difficult. Now, let us see how to improve this issue correctly.
How to overcome these challenges and ensure consistent performance on all browsers and devices?
Now, you have understood the challenges. Let’s see how can you overcome these challenges and ensure consistent performance on all browsers and devices.
- Write a Clean and Standard Codebase: The developers must follow a clean code structure. The codebase should be compliant with the standard web rules. The HTML and CSS codebase should be verified using tools like W3C validators. No unnecessary cluttering or complicating of the codebase should be done.
- Identify the Important Browsers: Understandably, you want your website to appear properly on all the existing browsers. However, sometimes this becomes impossible to implement because of the expected behavior, coding challenges, etc. In such a situation, the testing team should identify which are the most popular browsers, especially for your target audience. Then, first try to make the website consistent across these web browsers and then, try for the other ones. With a proper priority list in mind, your work will be more structured and productivity will be high.
- Step-By-Step Advancement: You shouldn’t hurry up to make sure that every single feature is working perfectly on all screen sizes, devices, and browsers. Instead, you need to break down your requirements into small compartments. First, make sure that all your basic functionalities are working fine on all the browsers. Next, target your advanced features and functionalities. Otherwise, all the requirements will get fused, confusing the entire development process.
- Be updated with new features: You need to stay updated always. Know the new upgrades coming on the web browsers. Accordingly, you have to use the latest coding standards, web frameworks, etc to make sure that there is no glitch or inconsistency on any websites.
What are the steps of cross-browser testing to ensure consistent website behavior?
1.Choose Your Target Website Browsers
- You can begin by analyzing your website analytics data to know which are the most extensively used browsers and operating systems of your target audience.
- Make a list of the browsers, browser versions, and devices (desktops, mobiles, and tablets) to prioritize for testing.
2.Select Cross-Browser Testing Tools
- Select the cross-browser testing tools like CrossBrowserTesting as per your project’s needs and budget.
- Enroll in the selected tool and become comfortable with its features and possibilities.
3.Create Test Cases
- Prepare test cases comprising the critical functionalities, user interactions, and UI elements of your website or web application.
- Verify that the test cases cover all the possible scenarios including different browers behavior.
4.Setup Automation Framework (Optional)
- If you can benefit from automation, prepare an automation framework like Selenium WebDriver to write test scripts.
- Prepare test scripts to automate repetitive jobs such as form submissions, navigation, and element verification across multiple browsers.
5.Perform Manual Testing
- Execute test cases through manual means on all target devices and browsers to ensure visual consistency, functionality, and user experience.
- Focus on layout differences, CSS rendering problems, Java Script, and cross-browser incompatibilities.
6.Test Responsive Design
- Use browser developer tools or responsive design testing tools to investigate the way your website changes when it is viewed on different screen sizes and resolutions.
- Ensure content is reorganized properly, font is legible, and interactive elements function across numerous devices.
7.Integrate Testing into the CI/CD Pipeline
- Integrate the automated regression testing into your CI/CD pipeline by performing cross-browser testing.
- Design test execution triggers to run cross-browser tests automatically after code commits or environment deployment to staging/production.
8.Analyze the Test Results in Details
- Look at the test results from different browsers and automation tools.
- Figure out which problems are the most serious and will affect users the most.
- Work together with the developers to fix any compatibility issues quickly.
Write down everything you find during testing, including how you fixed any issues. After the successful testing of one website, share your entire experience, challenges, and approach with the team members, so that the consistent performance is better from the next time.
Introducing the magic of parallel testing
When the demands of the website increase, a lot of testing can lead to a situation when you will hit the testing and developing limits by comparing the scalability and performance at the same time. In such a situation, if you keep on repeating this, you will never be able to implement the project in a realistic SDLC timeframe.
In such a situation, parallel testing can be very helpful. If you run parallel tests, you will be able to note down the differences in the behaviors and the number of testing cycles will be reduced, saving a lot of time for the QA time
Final words
So, now you know why a consistent behavior of the website is important and how can it be achieved in real-time projects. This consistent experience can be provided to the users only through the proper collaboration of the developers and testers. While coding the developer should keep in mind the diversity of the browsers, screen sizes, and devices used by the audience. The testers should also come up with solutions that are practical to be implemented by the developers. With the right collaboration of these two teams, an excellent website performance can easily be deployed. You can ensure consistent user experience and website testing through LambdaTest Ai-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you do seamless testing of your web applications and websites on 3000+ browser types and operating systems at the same time. LambdaTest’s infrastructure is hosted on the Cloud and the platform is trusted by millions of users across the globe.
