Being an application developer or tester, you will be very well-versed with cross browser testing. Most of you might be performing it as a day-to-day task in your organization. But, a lot of people are still unaware of cross browser testing and how it is evolving rapidly with time.
Today, we are going to talk about cross browser testing and how it is changing the testing process. We will also discuss the various aspects of testing that are evolving with cross browser testing.
Table of Contents
Starting with Functional Testing
The first testing technique that developers started using for their web app was functional testing. It has been around the corner even before the introduction of UI and Visual testing. Functional tests are termed as end-to-end tests because they ensure the functionality of an entire application on various platforms.
Visual testing, on the other hand, has attained a similar position to functional testing. Whether you are performing manual or automated testing, both visual testing and functional testing has become crucial for a web app. However, there is a huge difference in writing end-to-end tests as compared to visual tests.
The primary goal of cross browser visual testing is to ensure a smooth and perfect appearance of your web across various browsers, devices, and screen resolutions. What’s more interesting about visual testing is that you can easily integrate it with functional tests with the help of tools like LambdaTest. Defining which testing process should be concerned with cross browser testing is a bit difficult, so let’s have a detailed look at both these testing processes.
Functional Testing
Functional testing is a type of black-box testing, which is executed to test the functional requirements of a web app while finding any bugs in it. It majorly consists of the following steps:
- Identifying the functions that an application is expected to perform
- Creating an input dataset based on the function’s specification
- Determining the output based on the app specifications
- Executing the test cases to test the functionality
- Comparing the real outcome with the expected outcome
- Verifying whether the application is able to perform as per customer’s need or not
What’s common in functional testing is that you will have to execute the same steps, whether you’re performing it with manual testing or automation testing.
Visual Testing
Visual testing is slightly different than functional testing. Visual testing is executed to check the graphical user interface of your web app so that it becomes pleasing to the visitor’s eye. The following things that visual testing checks are positioning of the elements, colors, screen resolution, and other visual appearance aspects. So, testers need to execute the same visual tests across various browsers, screen resolutions, devices, and operating systems.
Visual testing follows the same steps as regression testing to verify that the screens, pages, or visual elements have not changed while running tests on different browsers, OS, and devices. You can also integrate visual tests with functional tests to run it after executing functional testing.
Automated Cross Browser Testing
If you don’t have any idea about what automated cross browser testing is, let’s tell you that it is the process of running automated tests across a combination of multiple browsers, OS, and devices. In general, the main purpose of cross browser testing is to ensure that the JavaScript and CSS of your web app are cross browser compatible, which means the application is performing as expected across all platforms.
It is similar to running cross browser visual testing, but the case is a little different from running cross browser functional testing. To better understand it, let’s have a clear look at cross browser functional testing and visual testing to analyze which method is more effective while testing an application.
Cross Browser Testing for Functionality
By now, you have got an idea about functional testing – it validates the functionality of an app and ensures that it is up to the user’s expectations in terms of performance.
As mentioned above, functional testing follows a step-by-step process to validate the main functions of a web app. For instance, verifying the payment methods on an ecommerce website is a part of functional testing. In this scenario, JavaScript works as the validator of the single-page app.
Another great example of functional testing is to ensure that the Logout button displays on the top of the menu bar when a user is logged in. To validate this feature, you need to write a function in JavaScript to check the LocalStorage.
By these examples, we want to clarify that if you follow the right procedure to write your JavaScript while using JavaScript APIs, it will ensure that the functional tests will run against others too. Though there are some exceptions, they only apply to a small part of your E2E tests.
To perform cross browser functionality testing, you will have to establish a virtual environment on your system, which could be very expensive to run tests across multiple browsers. It involves setting up various systems with different operating systems, browsers, devices, etc., so it’s not a feasible approach. On the above of that, if we add the costs, time, and the advancement in technologies, then it is no less than a nightmare.
However, if you choose to perform cross browser testing LambdaTest, which is already integrated with a combination of browsers, operating systems, and devices, then you don’t have to worry about the functional testing of your web app. Moreover, you don’t have to run functional and visual tests separately, it will automatically convert your end-to-end tests to visual tests.
Cross Browser Testing for Visual Appearance
Visual testing is another crucial part of cross browser testing to ensure the visible components are precisely the same across all browsers. During visual testing, only the visual appearance of the site is validated, not the functionality, but with functional testing, visual testing is also executed.
In short, visual testing is all about checking the visual elements placement on the page, the color ratio of the elements, and the screen size of the components on various browsers. For example, visual testing verifies whether elements are overlapping each other, obscure each other, or how responsive they are for different screen resolution.
But, examining all these aspects with cross browser CSS frameworks, such as Bootstrap, is very complicated and time-consuming. For instance, it’s not necessary that every browser has similar CSS components as others, which makes your tests more prone to errors.
In that case, it is advisable to use LambdaTest Selenium Grid that will help you help you avoid any errors while performing visual testing. Also, it is cost-effective, reliable, and easy-to-use.
Why LambdaTest for Cross Browser Testing?
Cross browser testing has become a necessity now for almost every organization that runs a business app. The reason behind its requirement is the rise of multiple browser, browser versions, operating systems, and devices. As there are millions of people in the world, and every one of them uses a device, OS, or browser as per their needs. So, if you have a web app that is available all around the world, then it’s crucial to check its cross browser compatibility because a user can access your site from any device, OS, or browser.
Though cross browser testing has been around the corner for a long time, the methods used to perform it were a little traditional. Earlier, testers need to set up a virtual environment on different devices to test different browsers, which was very time consuming and hectic. But, with the evolution of automation, the process of cross browser testing has also evolved. There are multiple tools available in the market that can be used to automate the cross browser compatibility testing for your web app from a single system without setting up a virtual environment.
LambdaTest is amongst one of the best automation testing tools, which not only help in cross browser testing, but also allow you to execute functional tests, visual tests, or perform real-time and parallel testing of your web app.
There are multiple features that make it stand out from others in terms of cross browser testing, such as:
- Provide support across more than 2000 browsers, OS, devices, and other platforms
- Allow testers to execute real-time testing, parallel testing, responsive testing, etc.
- No need to write various codes for different browsers, one script included with all browser information is enough
- An online selenium grid that doesn’t require external set up on your system
- Compatible with almost every testing framework like TestNG, JUnit, etc.
- Compatible for almost every programming language, such as Java, Python, C++, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.
- It comes with helpful features like generating screenshots, video recording, sharing, etc.
- Available as WordPress Plugin and Chrome Extension to make it easy for you to test your site pages continuously
These characteristics clearly define why LambdaTest is the ideal choice for cross browser testing of your web app. You can also check out How to perform cross browser testing with LambdaTest to know more about it.
Conclusion
The demand for cross browser testing is growing day-by-day. More and more organizations are willing to make the testing process easier for their development team so that they can create bug-free applications quickly and maintain continuous delivery. Therefore, they need a reliable solution that provides fast results and sustainability. But, most companies are still unaware of the impact of cross browser testing. So, we talked about the evolution of cross browser testing and how businesses can improve their cross browser compatibility testing process.
