Web Application Testing
From TestArmy
Web application testing. Pity the person who is responsible for ensuring a web site works for all visitors.
Contents |
The Problem
Most browsers are pretty similar when it comes to rendering a page, however, they are all subtly different. Sometimes so subtly different that they will totally break a website for a particular browser. And the person using that browser probably won't tell you, rather, they'll go buy their product from your competitor.
Depressingly, you might never find out about this leaking away of customers, if you don't test with all the browsers visiting your site.
Common Browsers
Here are some of the common browsers currently in use:
- IE 7.0
- IE 6.0
- IE 5.5
- Firefox 3
- Firefox 2
- Firefox 1.5
- Safari
- Opera
- Chrome
- Camino
- Netscape
You might think that not all these browsers are in common use, but in fact this was taken from the recent logs for this site, and there were at least twice as many more browser types which were not included.
Not good.
The Solution
One option is to download all these browsers, then run your web site in each of these. Very repetitive.
Of course, you also need to try it on the various operating systems. Firefox and Safari are popular on Windows and Macs. Even more repetitive, time consuming, and somewhat expensive.
Another option is to ignore the problem. This requires little effort and also indicates a lack of concern for potentially lost customers. Good for you.
TestArmy offers an alternative. This alternative reduces effort and cost.
Write some tests for the general public to complete, and get results from the world at large. Crowd source your test program. The world is out there with their many browsers.
This way, the repetitiveness is distributed, and you don't have to acquire a heap of software and hardware, just to do the same thing 100 times.
It's easy and quick to get up and running with TestArmy, and requires very little financial commitment.
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