Ask HN: Automatic cross-browser regression testing?
I'm creating a cross-browser "validator" similar to the way a W3C validator works that offers true cross-browser regression testing.
I think I've finally got a decent prototype in the works. You can give the app a domain name, and it will perform cross-browser testing, spitting back a list (and screenshots) of pages with compatibility problems, along with the browser culprits.
Basically it works by crawling a domain and processing an image of each page for all selected browsers, including a "golden browser." The golden browser is whatever browser the developer uses to develop the site, and what we assume is visually accurate. Each browser image is compared to the golden screenshot using a difference filter, and any problems are notated. There are certain variances allowed to deal with font differences and rounded corners, but it really hits the nail on the head with float drops and other layout problems. It does this automatically and produces a list of all the culprit pages and problem browsers.
I've hated browser testing so much that it drove me to do this. I'm not sure how much time everyone else spends on this, but I'm sure it accounts for 25% of my total dev time.
Available solutions like Litmus and Adobe's browser testing are decent, but are far behind what developer's really need. I hate going to dozens of individual pages to make sure new changes didn't break old pages.
Is this grounds to build a startup around, or just a feature litmus (or others) may offer? Is this something you would use?