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Comment by lvh | Hacker News Reader

(I've made this comment before on CasperJS/PhantomJS postings, but I've never gotten an answer.)

I love the idea, but I'm a bit worried that it's just webkit. Aren't all the other browsers important too? This is why I feel that Selenium still has a place, even though I agree that Casper is easier to use. Perhaps browserling is an appropriate answer?

I don't mean to disrespect CasperJS or PhantomJS, they're certainly wonderful tools, and any final automated functional test like this is infinitely better than none, but it's bad enough that people are developing for Webkit, do we really have to make it explicit by only testing on Webkit? ;)

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We're talking about "functional test" here.

Most likely your front-end/UI uses other libraries to handle cross-browser issues so your automation tests will focus on the functionality of the application as opposed to catching cross-browser bugs or performance issues.

The problem that PhantomJS solves is to run headless browser which is very useful for organization that runs their build/tests on their CI-server and would prefer minimal setups (as opposed to have "testing-labs" like the big guys [yahoo, ms, google]). That itself reduces the cost of development/testing cycle.

I prefer Testacular for exactly this reason. It allows you to capture any number of browsers. I've attached my physical iPad to it, and IE 8 out of a VM.

JsTestDriver and Test'em 'Scripts do too. (I haven't tried Test'em yet, but that's what I hear.)

Granted, these aren't tools for functional testing like Selenium and (apparently) CasperJS, but functional tests are something you want to minimize as much as possible. They're slow-running and brittle.

Something else worth noting: the most recent release of PhantomJS actually has an implementation of the Selenium WebDriver protocol, so you can use that, if you wish:

http://phantomjs.org/release-1.8.html

It implements the Selenium WebDriver protocol, but still executes it under WebKit.

The point of the parent is to test on multiple browsers.

I think the point of the person you're responding to, was that if you use the selenium interface with PhantomJS, you can change your testing browser to Firefox, Safari, etc with very little work on your part. i.e start with Phantom/Selenium, then test with the rest when you're ready.

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