The use of online platforms is very common nowadays and has become an essential part of our lives. Online applications are fulfilling many of the user’s needs, say teaching, working, shopping, and many other activities. So to exist in a competitive market it becomes very important to provide the user with a good quality application, which means it should be bug-free and must be fulfilling the user’s needs. For delivering an effective application, it has to go through different stages of development in terms of quality, compatibility, and reliability.
Quality user experience across all browsers has become a key requirement in today’s time. After designing the application and making it go through all the developmental stages the next important step is to do compatibility testing. If I make it very basic to describe compatibility then it would simply mean the capability of existing or living together. And similarly, compatibility testing means testing done to check whether an application is capable of running on different devices, operating systems, and network environments.
As mentioned above the existing market is competitive because technologies are evolving rapidly. But there are a significant number of people who are resistant to change, or in other words, they have an aversion to enhancing or improving their technology. In such a situation thanks to browser compatibility testing which enables the organizations to make sure that no user gets left behind or they face an undesired experience. Even though there are market-dominated browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox, there are still people who are comfortable in using their older versions or some other browsers. They cannot be ignored as their numbers are too high.
Cross-browser compatibility testing is a form of non-functional testing, which emphasizes providing the features and functionality of an application to the users on different devices, browsers, operating systems, and their respective versions. That means when your application can be viewed in a variety of browsers, and different screen sizes, it looks the way it should look. Then it can be said that your application is cross-browser compatible.
It is well known that every browser and device works on a different configuration, hence interpreting the application’s code differently. This difference becomes the reason why an application lacks uniformity across browsers and devices, and faces browser compatibility issues on different levels. So to avoid these issues below are some of the helpful tips that you can follow to make sure that your application is behaving as it is intended to behave.
Steps to be taken to make sure that the application does not behave unexpectedly:
- Testing the application in as many browsers as possible
- Code validation (writing good and clean HTML and CSS).
- Specifying character encoding.
- Making the application more accessible to users who use alternative technologies like screen readers.
- Keeping the application simple.
- Performance testing.
- Identifying UI inconsistencies.
Need for Cross-Browser Testing
Moving forward let’s get an understanding of why we need to consider browser compatibility testing.
Discussed in the above section that it is very important for your application to have the ability to render all the features exactly the same in different browsers and screen sizes. Users can access the application using a variety of browsers and devices, depending on their choices. Some may use Safari while others can go for Google Chrome. There are many people who prefer using mobile phones more than desktop computers. It is nothing personal to the application, but this is the reality. Now it is your job to present an application in the market keeping in mind that if the user gets access to your application they get the same experience, no matter how they access it.
After the above discussion, it can be said that ensuring a quality user experience is one of the important requirements in application development today regardless of the platforms the users use. Compatibility testing seems to be challenging, but you don’t need to worry your task gets easier when you employ the best compatibility testing tool. Here are the top compatibility testing tools to help you develop a consistent user experience across browsers.
Compatibility Testing Tools
1. LambdaTest
LambdaTest is one of the most popular browsers compatibility testing platforms. It ensures you with the smooth functioning of your web application on almost all desktops and mobile browsers available today. Users have the option to choose over a range of more than 3000 desktops, browsers, and operating systems with their respective versions, and collaborate with your team through an inbuilt tracking tool.
It has the feature called “Screenshot Testing” that provides auto-generated, a full-page screenshot of the web page. This platform also provides the tester to run automated Selenium scripts using a scalable cloud grid. Apart from all these LambdaTest cloud platforms enable the tester to execute responsive testing of your application and also test the locally or privately hosted pages
Besides, you can also test Internet Explorer for Mac machines and test your websites and web apps across different Internet Explorer browsers.
2. Test complete
Test complete is one of the compatibility testing tools that enable you to quickly create GUI tests and run across a number of real desktop browsers and mobile devices, operating systems, and in different screen resolutions. This helps you to ensure complete test coverage and improved application quality. It has many advanced features like localhost support, automated screenshot capture and compare features and versions ( via live testing), running parallel tests, multiple screenshots at once, and also sharing the test results. with the help of this tool, you get access to the developer tools and browser extensions, which helps debug the error
3. Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is a powerful platform for creating Web, Mobile, and API tests. Katalon Studio Recorder enables the users to Record and Replay tests easily and generates a Selenium script from that session. It provides live and continuous testing and parallel testing across several browsers and operating systems with their combinations on the cloud to speed up the test cycle. It also allows running Selenium automated scripts with increased coverage, improved quality, and shorter test time without the need to struggle with maintaining Selenium Grid.
4. Experitest
Experitest provides you with an easy way of performing browser compatibility testing by allowing the tester with real-time interaction with the application to debug easily. It provides the tester to test web applications across more than a thousand mobile and desktop browsers in the cloud using both manual and automated browser compatibility testing. Using this platform to detect and fix responsive design issues is possible. You can execute hundreds of tests in parallel and save a lot of time using Experitest.
Conclusion
Choosing a good browser compatibility testing tool is challenging as each tool comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Switching between browsers and comparing all the results involves a lot of effort. So it is recommended that you choose among testing tools to ease your task and get a quick result.