BrowserStack is out of beta: super-easy multi-browser testing

I was chugging along happily until I started observing someone else's testing session!

I typed "neato!" into their search bar; they promptly logged off.

I used to be interested in this type of service, but then I got an SSD. With an SSD it takes about 5 seconds to boot windows through parallels, and now cross browser testing is no longer a chore.

I am willing to admit that I pirate windows for the sole purpose of supporting IE with my webapps. It would be too expensive to do it legitimately, so my solution is not for everyone.

Browserstack is great, but it's still catching up to Sauce Scout (disclaimer: I work at Sauce Labs). It needs better support for testing firewalled or localhost sites, and it needs security (it re-uses VMs)

Awesome work, guys! I know first hand how hard it is to maintain a product like this :)

Is this somehow related to browserling/stackvm? Afaik the idea is the same but browserstack looks much more polished and mature.

Ok i just discovered that browserstack needs java so it seems they are using a different sw stack

A bit off-topic, but i find the Plans & Pricing page to be a very good example of how to design for an attention-lacking crowd, i.e. most web users. In particular, the team-size icons is a rare example of using eye-candy to succinctly help in clarifying for whom each package is tailored. Or maybe i am just easily excited today!

If anything, i would invert the per-person price with the overall price in order to give emphasis to "more people is actually cheaper". There is something in descending prices that makes people feel good.

the rotated text does not look good in firefox 7/mac:

http://i.imgur.com/XsiTi.png

i know of a service they can use for testing their website in different browsers...

This looks interesting - we've been pretty happy with crossbrowsertesting.com until now, which is also worth a look.

Here's what I'd love next - we'd write a bunch of QUnit javascript tests, put them behind a private url on our staging server, and then be able to run those tests from the command-line on multiple browsers (through BrowserStack, say), and spit back the output in a form that Jenkins understands. I'd certainly pay $20/month for that, and maybe more if it was great.

This looks cool, but I'm not sure about the long-term value.

Looking at their browser list, I could test all Firefox, Opera, and Chrome versions, one version of IE, and the Windows versions of Safari on one Windows 7 box.

I could add to that three VMs for older versions of IE, and a Mac (maybe with a VM) for Mac Safari versions. If the main Win7 machine is also a VM, I could do this all on the Mac.

So, that's a total of 5-6 OS licenses, which would cost $750-$1000.

At $19/month for a single user, BrowserStack becomes more expensive after 2-3 years. At the small team rate of $68/year it becomes more expensive after one year. (I could host VMs on a server and have my testers RDP into it; they can't use the VMs simultaneously but with 4 testers and 5-6 VMs that's not a problem.)

To me, the pricing is right on the edge, which forces me to evaluate the effort of maintaining local VMs and browsers (an invisible cost is most organizations) vs the potential risks of running my in-development software and providing access to my development environments to a third-party over the internet. If the pricing was lower and clearly less expensive than maintaining my own VMs, it'd be a slam-dunk decision and the other factors wouldn't even be considered. (I'm thinking about this from a "how does a developer sell this to corporate management" perspective.)

Just tried this on my in-development web app. The good news is that it works like a charm. The bad news is that the browsers keep prompting to save the password of my test account. I wish they'd turned of password manager for all of the browsers.

I also feel a little weird typing in my test account password into their site.

Bravo BrowserStack team! I am using this to test IE7 on our staging environment. Your signup process was great, I was able to jump-in and start testing immediately. I think you could add better communication and assurances about security and private information. Keep up the good work.

This is really well done. It's going to be very useful to us, thanks!

Edit: The tunnel to my local server doesn't work. I keep getting "There's no server running at port 80".

Just showed this to some people at a company I'm working at. I'm guessing they are going to spring for it - 4 seats at least :P Good job dude.

Too slow to use over here in Europe. Feels like using VNC on a dialup.

Cool logo... what I really need is android/ios device testing.

Clever logo but butt ugly.

Too slow to accept.

maintenance is spelled wrong

I would prefer to use http://browserling.com/ all day. The home page design is way more awesome.

An API would be great for us since it would let us to run our tests against all web browsers by making some http requests. Wouldn't it be revolutionary?