What is Cross-browser Testing?
Cross Browser Testing is a process to test web application or website across multiple browsers. Cross browser testing involves checking compatibility of your application across multiple web browsers and ensures that your web application works correctly across different web browsers. It is applicable to both the web and mobile applications.
Why do we need Cross Browser Testing?
In cross-browser testing, we need to ensure that the web application will work as expected in all popular browsers so that more and more people can access it and use it without any issue. As we know that web applications are completely different from the software application. A web application or website can be accessed in any browser by the end users. At this point of time, we need cross browser testing. Let’s have a look why cross-browser testing is necessary.
- In different browsers, JavaScript implementation can be different.
- Font size can be different in different browsers.
- Some of the browsers are not able to support HTML5.
- In some browsers, HTML and CSS validation are different.
How to perform Cross Browser Testing
First of all, I want to say that cross browser testing can be performed manually or it can be performed by some other well knew testing tools. You can test your web application in multiple browsers, Operating systems and much more. But it is advisable to do cross browser testing with some tools. There are a lot of cross browser tools available in the market. Cross browser testing involves testing both the client side and server side behavior of your Web application when it is accessed using different web browsers. If you are using Selenium WebDriver then you can automate test cases using FireFox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. You can integrate TestNG framework with Selenium WebDriver to execute test cases with different browsers.
Cross Browser Testing Tools
Cross browser testing includes Client-Side and Server-Side testing. So, If you want to run client side cross browser testing then you can use AppPerfect Web Test. It can help you test functionality of your web application on client side on different web browsers. It also ensures compatibility of your application on different browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome at the same time. You can record a test on any one Web browser and run it on different browsers and this way test application’s behavior on different browsers without the need to re-record test on multiple browsers.
If you want to run server side cross browser testing then you can use AppPerfect Load Test. It can help you test behavior of your web application on the server side when the application is accessed from different web browsers. AppPerfect Load Test supports Load testing for Web applications using HTTP protocol and can be configured to simulate the HTTP requests from different web browsers.
Comments by Steve Young