Really Test Your Website for different browsers and devices | Hacker News Reader

Really Test Your Website for different browsers and devices

browseemall.com

14 pointsdherken13 comments

Tempting. But judging from their FAQ, it seem it's running a simulation, not running on the actual browser versions, so some differences should be expected:

"To use all Internet Explorer versions, you need to install Internet Explorer 9 on your machine. You don`t need to install older Internet Explorer versions."

http://www.browseemall.com/Support/FAQ#technical-2

http://www.browseemall.com/Blog/post/2012/07/26/How-good-are...

And that is why this software is irrelevant. You need to test on the native versions. Too many times a simulator have tricked me into believing something works when it doesn't.

No mention of which operating system this is for (though I can guess from the screenshots)

Download free trial (call to action !) .... starts downloading the .exe immediately while showing you the page informing you "Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8"

I've seen this often: if you are selling desktop applications then state the OS support right away. Its very often several clicks to find this essential information.

The HUGE screenshot in the page, front and center, pretty clearly shows a Windows OS user interface. But I do agree, he should be really explicit and mention supported OS's.

but that only tells you that there is a windows version, not that there is no other version.

and its curious that I have to look at the chrome of the window and guess that its windows, since I haven't even seen a windows machine in person for several years.

.exe . Looks like I'll stick to VirtualBox + any OS + browser for PC based testing, and all the devices and analogues needed for device testing

EDIT: also why the hell did I have to click download to find out it's Windows only?

I know, I hate that! How hard is it to check my user agent?

Instead of managing your own grid, you can use saucelabs.com

Wow, its almost as if simply changing your user agent does not in fact automagically force chrome to render in various other browsers!

(On a serious note, this looks handy)

What?

Are you assuming that Google Chrome packs Trident, Gecko and other engines along with Webkit?

I think that was sarcasm, although it's hard to tell over the internet :)

Wait a sec, is that all they're doing? If so then that's really lame.

What I assumed from their product description was that they're running all those browsers in VMs or some-such in the same way that browserify.com, crossbrowsertesting.com and browserstack.com do. That would be very cool to have as a local service but quite hard to pull of in a way that's nicer to use than just running a bunch of VMs yourself (which is a bit of pain).

Massively overselling your product isn't a good idea. If they sold it as what it is then maybe that's useful to someone. But implying that it is more than that just makes it look really really lame.

Pretty ironic that something to test a variety of platforms and browsers is only supported on windows and "recommends" use with IE 9.

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