Cross Browser Testing

Ah, the dreaded cross browser test… It’s one of those things that just make you want to jump out of a window. My workspace is on the second floor, so I probably wouldn’t die. But it still wouldn’t feel good.

Will that CSS file you created work on all of the browsers? Will your JavaScript work the way it is supposed to? Also, does your website have to look the same in every browser to make you / your boss / your client happy? Is your boss or your client even aware of cross browser issues?

I’ve only been in the web design and development field for about a year and a half now, so I did not have to go through the free-for-all years of the early internet where each browser was completely different from one another. Web standards are making this process easier, but there are still numerous differences between even modern browsers. And depending on your website’s visitors, you might have to do a lot of adjustments for Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Whatever your approach to these matters (progressive enhancement, etc.), you still have to find some way to test out the site in all of the browsers. Working through the modern browsers is fairly simple, but making adjustments specific to IE6 and IE7 can be a pain. I have found no better solution than CrossBrowserTesting.com.

Not only can you test all of the browsers, but you can also test web apps through different operating systems. It can be kind of frustrating trying to test through the Windows 98, since it moves so very slowly compared to today’s machines. But that is what these users are seeing.

Now you may not have any need of testing Windows 98, but the sites that I work with at my day job are often visited by users with machines that are seriously behind the times. We as a company could simply design towards today’s standards and just let all of our users catch up, but who knows if they would still remember us by the time they updated their hardware? We need visitors today and three years from now, so we are constantly trying to balance the two extremes. Without a service like CrossBrowserTesting, it would take much longer to make our sites accessible to as many users as possible.