We know very well how important a website is in this era of software technology. Today, every person uses a website in their daily schedule for some reason or another. Also, every user prefers different browsing platforms according to their requirements. Thus, to ensure that the website is performing well and is suitable for giving a seamless user experience is crucial. So, the best way to ensure website performance is by conducting automated cross-browser testing.
Cross browser testing best ensures the performance of the website. This is because we ensure the software applications work fine on every browser while conducting cross-browser testing. It mainly focuses on the website’s responsiveness and the correct visibility of the software application across various browsers. Also, cross-browser testing tends to be an effort-taking and time-consuming task. Therefore, testers prefer using automated testing. It eases their testing process.
For conducting cross-browser testing, testers need multiple browsers where they can ensure the correctness of the website. Again, this will be excessive utilization of the resources. Thus, testers may even use cloud-based platforms to test their software application across multiple browsers without actual setup. Let us briefly understand how the website’s performance can be ensured using automated cross-browser testing.
What is Automated Cross-browser Testing?
Cross-browser testing is a way to ensure software applications are compatible with every browser from which they are accessed. To ensure cross-browser compatibility, you must test software applications across every browser the end-user uses. This will require both time and effort. But what if you can do this with minimum utilization of effort and time? The methodology used to test cross-browser compatibility with little human interference is known as automated cross-browser testing.
Automated cross-browser testing is preferred because it can test the software application faster than manual testing. Also, it allows you to test the software application regressively through the CI/CD pipeline. Also, the software application is more costly than manual testing. But it is worth it as it saves more than what is spent. You can integrate your automation testing in a cloud-based platform as it can save you additional costs required for multiple browser setups.
Thus, automated cross-browser testing integrated into a cloud-based platform like LambdaTest is the best way to ensure that the software application functions well across various browsers. LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. The platform allows you to perform real-time and automation testing across 3000+ environments and real mobile devices.
Also, it is the best way to provide a seamless user experience with the best quality software applications.
Importance of Cross-Browser Compatibility in Software Development
With the advancement in software technology, we have a wide variety of users with abilities and disabilities. As a software developer, it is the individual’s responsibility to develop a software application suitable for every user, irrespective of the browser they are accessing. For this, they must perform cross-browser compatibility testing on the software application.
Cross-browser compatibility testing will ensure that the software application is functioning properly. It maintains the software application and helps in delivering a seamless user experience. It also focuses on the visual design of the software application and ensures they appear the same across every browser.
Ensuring cross-browser compatibility in software applications is also important, as it may lead to broken visuals. The software application may have a different layout when accessed in different browsers or may not be aligned properly. Usually, dysfunctional software application features across multiple browsers lead to frustrated users, which may cause the application’s obsoletion.
Types of Cross-browser Compatibility Testing
Cross-browser testing involves a list of testing techniques. To ensure the performance of the software application with automated cross-browser testing, you need to carry them out. Here is a list of various testing techniques that make up cross-browser testing.
- Functional Testing: This type of testing verifies that all interactive features of your website work as expected in different browsers.
- Visual Regression Testing: This testing technique centers on the visual appearance of a software application over diverse browsers and gadgets.
- Performance Testing: Performance testing evaluates software applications’ speed and responsiveness over different browsers.
- Cross-Device Testing: This testing guarantees that the website is properly on various devices, including desktops, portable workstations, tablets, and phones.
- Cross-platform Testing: An aspect of this testing is checking the compatibility of software applications across various browsers and operating systems.
- Browser Version Testing: This type of testing entails running a software application through various versions of a specific browser to ensure compatibility across multiple iterations.
- Accessibility Testing: This type of testing ensures that a website is accessible to every person, even those with disabilities, and meets accessibility standards for developing software applications.
- Security Testing: This testing technique is used to verify that the software application’s security features and protocols function consistently across various browsers and platforms.
Challenges Faced in Ensuring Performance with Automated Cross-Browser
Automated cross-browser testing reduces the effort and overall time required to develop a software application. But this does not mean there aren’t any other issues. Here is a list of challenges that arise while ensuring performance with automated testing.
- Software applications developed using various programming languages and browsers may interrupt them differently. This sometimes leads to variations in the layout and visual appearance. These differences lead to the bad performance of the software application.
- Every programming language has its own set of properties and elements. Sometimes, these features are compatible with one browser and not with the other. Due to this incompatibility, the software application breaks out while accessing through different browsers, leading to the bad performance of the software application.
- Software applications may function differently on different browsers. Thus, optimizing the software application to perform well on every browser is essential. This is considered a challenging task due to varying levels of hardware acceleration. Also, various caching mechanisms make the optimization of software applications difficult.
- To ensure the performance of the software application, you will have to test them from different browsers individually. You must set up a different environment to test the software application on different browsers. And we know there are multiple combinations of browser devices and operating systems. Thus, it requires a tremendous amount of time and effort.
- Developers may struggle with browser-specific problems affecting form submission, caching, and other important features. Because these problems can appear differently in different browsers, careful testing and solutions are needed to guarantee consistent functionality and performance.
Best Practices for Ensuring Performance with Automated Cross-browser Compatibility
To every problem, there is a solution. Here is a list of best practices that can be used to overcome the challenges faced while ensuring performance with automated cross-browser compatibility testing.
- Find out which browsers your target audience uses most frequently. To guarantee the greatest user experience for most visitors, concentrate your testing efforts on these browsers.
- Prioritize testing on the most widely used web browsers by the general public. It is more probable that your visitors will use these browsers because of their larger user bases.
- Remember to test on mobile browsers since most internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices and is responsive.
- Learn how to use the developer tools included in most modern browsers. By simulating various browser contexts, debugging JavaScript, and inspecting components, these tools facilitate the identification and resolution of problems.
- Think about utilizing services and technologies for cross-browser testing. With the various browser and OS combinations available on these platforms, you may test effectively without setting up different physical settings.
- Update your list of browsers that you want to target. Older versions of browsers may lose their relevance as newer versions are frequently released. Try using the most recent browser versions to fix problems before they spread.
- To ensure that your code compiles with web standards, use validation tools, as it is more likely that valid code will display uniformly in all browsers.
- To ensure the performance of the software applications, you must design them according to the baseline that works seamlessly on every browser and device. Once the base design is achieved, you can enhance it with additional features for modern browsers.
- The other way to ensure performance with automated cross-browser compatibility is by executing test cases regressively through the CI/CD pipeline.
- You may even use the cloud-based platform to test the software application, as it will allow you to test your software application without the need for a physical setup of hardware.
Conclusion
Ensuring the good performance of the software application is very much needed. The performance of the software application decides its quality. Also, it will decide whether the end-user will prefer using the software application.
This article shows automated cross browser testing and its importance for developing a good software application. We have also learned about various challenges we could come across. But as said earlier, every problem comes with a solution. Therefore, applying the best practices to your automated cross-browser testing can ensure the software application’s performance.
