Browser Compatibility Testing

The first task that was given to me in my company was to do the browser compatibility testing of one site. As a fresher I got to know many things about the Cross Browser Compatibility Testing. I would like to share it.

 Variety of Browsers

In today’s internet world, there are many browsers available for a user to surf the websites. The most used browsers today include:-

Internet Explorer (IE 9, IE 8 & IE 7)

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome

Safari

Opera

There are many more browsers available in the market, but majority of the users’ uses one of the above mentioned browsers.

  

So… What’s The Issue?

          The problem starts when different users’ uses different browsers to surf a single website. Different browsers have different standards set by them to read an Html or Css code and display it on the screen. We are very grateful to the W3C and Web Standardization, because of which the differences between these standards are minimized but they are not finished yet.

The same designing code will act differently when executed by different browsers. And it can act differently up to an extent that sometimes a particular functionality stops working in one or more browser but it works perfectly fine in other browsers. Sometimes the text alignment changes, sometimes designing changes completely, etc. etc. Ultimately these problems can present the site with a messy look. These small (as well as large) problems can affect the end user’s experience interacting with the site up to a great extent, because the functionality will come next but if the designing & looks of the website is not good/decent/beautiful/catchy/professional, the user will… Just Close It.

Reason for This Issue

           There can be numerous reasons for cross browser compatibility issues. The smart developers always follow the defined standards while developing the website. But still there may be a small css block or a particular Html extension which can cause issues. Sometimes even the users have set some configurations in their browsers like font size, screen resolutions, etc. that can cause problems. But that’s not our point. Here we will discuss that what points should be kept in mind while doing a Cross Browser Compatibility Test for a particular website.

Important Points in Cross Browser Compatibility Testing

           I implemented this test on Internet Explorer (7, 8 and 9), Mozilla Firefox & Google Chrome. I have done it numerous times in my colleges and in my project companies but this was the first time I was doing it on job. While doing the cross browser compatibility test as a fresh tester, what I realized is that the latest browsers are having very few chances for these cross browser issues. I noted that the code was running and executing almost same on Firefox & Chrome Browsers.

          The IE Browsers were having much trouble. IE 9 was having the least issues. But if u run the same page in IE 8, there were some differences. And when you run it in IE 7, things starts getting messy.

          Slowly and gradually, it started getting clear to me that which browser is more prone to error for a particular functionality. It may sound surprising, but I did found some bugs in Google Chrome too.

          I listed all the bugs, checked it again by reproducing them, and carried out the procedure of reporting it to the development team. At the end, most of them were solved. ALL’s WELL THAT ENDS WELL