Cross browser testing is a test that’s performed by multiple web browsers to ensure that the site functions correctly across different systems. It’s important to remember that cross browser testing doesn’t just mean running your website through multiple browsers; it means running your website through multiple browsers and operating systems and making sure that none of them are experiencing any problems.
If you have a site that works beautifully on Windows XP but not on Windows Vista, for example, you need to know about it before you go live with your new site so you can fix it before people start complaining about it.
So if you want to make sure that your site looks good in all kinds of browsers and operating systems—and that it also works as well as possible on those platforms—then you need to do some cross-browser testing as part of your development process.
What is Cross-Browser Testing?
Cross-browser testing is a way to ensure that your website looks and functions the same across multiple browsers.
If you’ve ever noticed that certain aspects of your site look different from one browser to the next, or if you’ve had users complain that something on your website doesn’t work for them, cross-browser testing could be for you.
The goal of cross-browser testing is to find out how well a website performs on different browsers and devices. This can give you an idea of whether or not a change needs to be made to your site in order for it to look the same across all platforms.
Cross-browser testing also helps make sure that any changes made don’t affect how well your site loads or performs across different browsers and devices.
It’s important to understand how each browser renders your site because all of them have different ways of interpreting code. Some browsers are more lenient than others, but some are more strict or have bugs that can break your site.
If you don’t test your site in multiple browsers before launching it, then you’ll run into problems when users try to visit your site with a different browser than the one you tested with.
Why do we need cross-browser testing?
Because more often than not, a single browser will not be enough to test your site. Different browsers have different features and capabilities that could affect the way your site looks and works on them.
For example, some of the most popular browsers are Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. These three differ from each other in many ways: their user interface, built-in features like ad blockers or privacy settings, image rendering capabilities, etc.
When to begin cross-browser testing?
If you’re thinking about doing cross-browser testing, you probably have a good idea of what it is and why it’s important. But do you know when to start?
The best time to start cross-browser testing is before you build your website! In fact, if you’re building a website from scratch, it’s a good idea to incorporate cross-browser testing into the design process. This way, when your design is complete and ready for development, it will be tested and ready for launch—without the need for any additional work.
Before we get into how to do this, let’s talk about why this is such an important consideration. The truth is that every user has their own experience with every website they visit online: some people use Chrome while others use Firefox; some people have older versions of Internet Explorer while others have newer versions; some people have fast internet connections while others have slower ones… The list goes on and on! And since every person has different needs and requirements when visiting websites, we must make sure our sites look good for everyone—not just one person or group of people! This means our designs must be responsive across multiple browsers and devices.
Cross-browser testing is the process of making sure your website works across a variety of browsers and operating systems. If you’re a developer and you’ve never done cross-browser testing before, it can seem intimidating. After all, there are so many combinations of browsers, operating systems, and more that it can seem impossible to test them all.
But don’t worry! There’s an easy solution for this—you just need to do some research into what the most popular combinations are and test those. For example, if you find out that most people use Chrome on Windows 10, then you could just focus on testing these two combinations.
If you want to go beyond those two combinations and make sure that your site works on other platforms as well (like iOS or Linux), then you can get a little more complicated by using automated tools like Selenium or PhantomJS. These tools will let you run automated tests on every combination of browser/OS/etc., so it’ll take less time overall compared to manual testing.
Here are some ways to generate test cases for cross-browser testing
1. Use a browser emulator
You’ve been working on a new website design and you’re ready to show it off. But before you do, you want to make sure it works across all major browsers. The problem? You have no idea how to do cross-browser testing.
Luckily, there’s a solution: using browser emulators!
Browser emulators allow you to test your site in different browsers without having those browsers installed on your computer. This means that even if the site doesn’t work on Chrome or Firefox, you can see how it will look in those browsers with no extra effort. It also lets you test sites that require specific plugins or extensions—so if your site needs Flash or Silverlight, for example, the emulator will let you see what it looks like when those plugins are enabled or disabled.
Cross-browser testing is a critical part of web development. It ensures that your site will work across multiple browsers, and it’s especially important if you’re developing a mobile site or native app.
But cross-browser testing can be tedious and time-consuming since it requires setting up multiple browsers on your computer and then manually switching between them as you test. Plus, it’s impossible to test how your site performs on each browser without using all those different browsers.
The good news is that there’s an easy way to reduce the time and effort involved in cross-browser testing: use an emulator! An emulator is a program that mimics another piece of hardware or software (like a website). When you’re developing a website, emulators are useful because they let you see how a page looks on different operating systems, devices, and even in different versions of the same browser (e.g., Chrome 63 versus Chrome 64).
You can use an emulator to simulate user behaviours like scrolling down the page or clicking on links—which means that when someone visits your site with an older version of Chrome installed on their phone or tablet, they’ll still have access to all the content.
2. Browser plugins
If you’ve been a web developer for any length of time, you’ve probably run into the problem of cross-browser testing. That is, making sure that your website works on different browsers and platforms.
It’s not always easy to keep track of all the different platforms and browsers out there, so we’ll use browser plugins to generate cross-browser testing.
Browser plugins are pieces of software that you can add to your browser to extend its functionality. They’re usually free and open-source, so they’re legal for commercial use as well as personal use.
The first plugin we’ll use is called Cross Browser Testing Toolkit by Google Chrome Extensions. It allows us to test our website across multiple platforms and browsers at once from within Google Chrome itself!
How to generate test cases for cross-browser tests?
Test case generation is a software testing process that uses a set of rules to generate test data such as inputs, expected results, and paths. It is an iterative process where the tester will use the initial automated tests to identify more tests as he/she goes along.
3. Manual
This involves manually creating test cases by observing the behaviour of the web application in different browsers and recording them. The manual testing process is essential to ensure that all the functionalities of a software product are working as expected. Manual testing is mainly used to verify user interface (UI) functionality, which helps users perform tasks on a website or application. Manual testing can be performed by either an independent tester or by a member of the development team. It involves checking each function of an application in order to find bugs and report them to developers for fixing.
The manual process consists of several steps, including:
-Identifying testable components within the application (e.g., buttons or links).
-Following a set of steps from start to finish within each component, using any combination of mouse clicks or keystrokes as required.
-Observing what happens when each step is performed in order to ensure that it works properly without errors or unexpected behaviour occurring along the way.
There are two types of manual testing:
- White box testing: In this type of testing, the test cases are designed based on an understanding of how each component works internally. It is designed to test every single path through the system, including all possible user inputs that might affect its behavior at runtime (such as adding items to an empty shopping cart).
This type of testing is usually done by developers or testers who have access to source code or blueprints before they begin creating test cases (because they know what’s inside).
- Black box testing: In black-box testing, we don’t have access to source code or blueprints when creating our
4. Scripting
You can automate this process by using scripts or programs that run on every browser and recording their responses. Run sanity checks on each browser by hand and make sure everything looks right before running any automated tests or opening up any other websites from within them (like Google Maps).
5. Automation tools
Some automation tools allow you to generate test cases automatically after identifying the specifications of your application and its behaviour on different browsers.
Use a tool like Selenium WebDriver or Protractor to automate the process of interacting with your site in all the different browsers you want to test. This will allow you to run automated tests on a schedule and make sure that nothing breaks over time as browsers update or new ones come out.
There are also other cloud-based automation testing platforms like LambdaTest.
LambdaTest is a continuous quality testing cloud to facilitate test execution and orchestration. It lets you perform both exploratory and automated testing across 3000+ real browsers, devices, and OS combinations.
Whether you are stuck with slow test execution or struggling with legacy in-house infrastructure, LambdaTest has got you covered!
With LambdaTest, you can perform end-to-end (E2E) testing for web and mobile on a scalable, secure, and reliable automation cloud infrastructure. It offers support for test automation frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, TestCafe, Puppeteer, Taiko, Playwright, Appium, Espresso, and XCUITest.
