Cross-Browser Testing Tool Will Rock Your Socks Off | Hacker News Reader

Cross-Browser Testing Tool Will Rock Your Socks Off

browserstack.com

88 pointssrcasm34 comments

If you're looking for a service that's live, I've been using http://crossbrowsertesting.com/ happily for the last two or three years.

Also, if you're testing emails in different clients (worse than IE6 compatibility testing IMHO), I highly recommend http://litmus.com/

By the way, just realized you are based out of India. Great job! Very happy to see a quality web product that is made in India. Who did your design? Love it!

great you liked our design! I am the designer of the site :)

Is it like http://browserling.com ?

Can it handle httpauth?

yes it can. you can even test your local setup (both local servers and local html files)

One thing I never quite understood about online testing tools like browserstack and saucelabs is how to reset server state.

Most webapps have some kind of datastore. Poking around a web ui will CRUD records in that datastore, possibly corrupting the next test. Another problem with this is coupling between tests, making them hard to modify without breaking a bunch of others.

Most automated test setups I have seen run on a local machine, and all server state is reset between each test.

How is this done on browserstack/saucelabs?

I think they just delete the user profile which is where browsers usually save their data.

(not 100% sure about that, but I think Selenium mentioned that in the logging output)

By datastore I meant server side database (SQL/NoSQL)

The way you'd usually do it is either having a multi-user application and just create a new user for a new test (also helps testing concurrently) or you'll have to reset the app by:

- redeploying it on a new e.g. EC2 instance

- clearing out the database and inserting your original blank state from an SQL dump

- clearing out the filesystem by e.g. using a git reset

p.s. you should try to have an automated deployment for your product. That way you could also just spin up a new EC2 instance -> deploy -> test -> kill instance

It's funny, the only use I see for this is IE testing, since everything else I can install the latest version of on my Mac, and the differences between versions are pretty small (and if you can support IE's lack of HTML5 functionality you can certainly do the same for FF3).

Still, solid UI and product, and will be handy for the quick IE spot-checks that I should be doing more of :).

What about testing on Windows?

With the exception of fonts there should be virtually 0 rendering differences between osx and windows versions of the same browser.

should

I've run into the situation more times than I can count where there was some little display difference between, for example, FF on OSX and FF on Windows. Always pays to spend the short amount of extra time needed to test across operating systems.

http://crossbrowsertesting.com/ is an alternative that has proven very good and cost effective for me.

This does appear to be cheaper though. The local testing thing may be cool. Not sure how that will work.

Sadly doesn't seem to offer an option to do automated testing (such as a selenium endpoint).

Thats entirely a different problem, as of now we are completely focused in providing browsers across OSes and Mobile platforms with a very easy to use UI!

Might be OT, but does anyone know of a similar service for MOBILE browsers?

Obviously Android and iOS are webkit based... but what about the horror that is BlackBerry rendering? <shudder>

Perfecto Mobile is pretty good

I thought this was going to be another cross-browsing testing thing that wouldn't work for me, but the local access is a really good idea. It really does change everything.

My invite request got approved right after the request, but the service isn't working for me :(

All I get is "Oops! We have run into a small problem. Please try again." over and over again.

Overloaded?

Is it working for you now?

Would be nice if it supported browsers on Linux and Mac too, or does it already?

It's their next feature according to Twitter

http://twitter.com/#!/browserstack/status/110011514911592449

How does it work? It's not a virtual machine, right?

We provide real browsers in the cloud across the globe for high responsiveness!

I think it's too pricey. But maybe it's just me.

we are trying to keep our prices as low as possible. We want to reach every developer/designer!

I think your prepaid plan should appeal to many small sites that anticipate only small changes over time. It's really a sweet spot in my mind.

Is that similar to Browsermob and AlertFox?

nope. they are monitoring and load testing tools. Browserstack helps you make your site work on all browsers

Invites?

I would add a per-test pricing plan, which is useful when you need to do just a few tests while developing, rather than forking $19/month.

99c to test in 5 different browser/OS combinations would be cool.

For you we already have reasonable prepaid plans!

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