Free Automated Cross-Browser JavaScript Testing(blog.parse.com)
blog.parse.com
Free Automated Cross-Browser JavaScript Testing
http://blog.parse.com/2012/06/28/free-automated-cross-browser-javascript-testing/
5 comments
Good advice! Another alternative, if you don't need mobile browser tests, is Testling, which runs your tests on Browserling's servers. It's not free, but way easier to get started.
Or consider using TestingBot.com which provides mobile testing with Selenium. Easier than setting up/maintaining everything yourself.
The browser versions here are never mentioned, which means this is "multi-browser", and not "cross-browser" (a large difference).
Furthermore, the following snippets are simply false:
> But Internet Explorer is the black sheep of the browser world. If your tests fail in just one browser, well, you get the picture.
Funny how older versions of browsers such as Opera are never mentioned. IE versions 6-8 seem to be the only "old" browsers that exist. Which of course is because they're still in use. Myopia reigns supreme.
I've often found that IE versions 4-9 will point out errors I've made in my code, as the IE platform is far more strict than browsers such as Firefox, which scramble to protect bad code.
> Accordingly, automating testing in Internet Explorer is much more involved than any other browser.
As someone that tests in 20+ browsers, I spend a lot more time on Firefox versions 1-13 than I do with IE versions 4-9, especially with scripting. Nevermind Google Chrome, which makes testing incremental versions nearly impossible (and no, auto-upgrades are no guarantee).
> Getting automatic cross-browser JavaScript testing working is a complex affair, and bound to involve some amount of trial and error.
Conclusion: test manually. There are no guarantees.
Furthermore, the following snippets are simply false:
> But Internet Explorer is the black sheep of the browser world. If your tests fail in just one browser, well, you get the picture.
Funny how older versions of browsers such as Opera are never mentioned. IE versions 6-8 seem to be the only "old" browsers that exist. Which of course is because they're still in use. Myopia reigns supreme.
I've often found that IE versions 4-9 will point out errors I've made in my code, as the IE platform is far more strict than browsers such as Firefox, which scramble to protect bad code.
> Accordingly, automating testing in Internet Explorer is much more involved than any other browser.
As someone that tests in 20+ browsers, I spend a lot more time on Firefox versions 1-13 than I do with IE versions 4-9, especially with scripting. Nevermind Google Chrome, which makes testing incremental versions nearly impossible (and no, auto-upgrades are no guarantee).
> Getting automatic cross-browser JavaScript testing working is a complex affair, and bound to involve some amount of trial and error.
Conclusion: test manually. There are no guarantees.
What product are you working on that it's possibly worth your time to test with FF 1? It's got like 0.01% marketshare at most. People mention IE 6-8 because large numbers of people are still on it due to corporate IT policies.
http://saucelabs.com/ provides this setup as a service. And theirs is much more sophisticated, with screenshots and videos of failed tests.
I built a simple cli tool to do cross browser unit testing.
bunyip: http://ryanseddon.github.com/bunyip/
bunyip: http://ryanseddon.github.com/bunyip/
If you don't actually care about cross-browser testing you can use phantomjs which is considerably nicer.