Ensuring Browser Compatibility Across Multiple Devices And Platforms

Are you a new software tester struggling to implement browser compatibility across multiple platforms and devices? This is the perfect blog for you as we will explain various strategies, tools, and best practices for ensuring browser compatibility across multiple devices and platforms.

Presently, it is very important for the testers to ensure that the web apps function in the same format across various devices, browsers, and platforms. This is because the end users can access these apps on multiple devices as per their requirements or preferences.

It is not a simple task to achieve possible browser compatibility on such a huge range of software and hardware configurations. However, with the proper implementation of advanced strategies, developers can achieve this goal.

Understanding Browser Compatibility

Browser compatibility is the procedure to ensure that your web app or website functions as you wanted across multiple web browsers. The process of browser compatibility includes guaranteeing consistent rendering of the user interface, ensuring proper functionality, and providing a smooth UX irrespective of the device being used or the browser version.

Importance of Browser Compatibility

Now that we have developed a clear understanding of the basics of browser compatibility, let us go through some other major factors that can justify the importance of executing this process:

• Inconsistent behavior across various browsers can frustrate most of the users and lead to a negative user experience. This is one of the major reasons that leads to high bounce rates and low user retention rates.

• It is very important to ensure the compatibility across multiple segments of the audience, including those using less popular browsers or older versions. By implementing this approach, the app developing companies can successfully create a positive brand reputation.

• Most of the modern search engines give preference to websites which provide a good user experience across different devices and browsers. So, by implementing this practice, the app developing companies can massively increase their rankings in search results.

• It is a common idea that by creating a website that works seamlessly across all platforms will reflect the professionalism of the brand and also its serious commitment towards maintaining a high-quality end-user experience.

Challenges in Achieving Browser Compatibility

However, while implementing browser compatibility, the application developers and testers will come across some of the major challenges that can pose a serious hurdle in the deployment process. To shed more light on this segment, we have mentioned some of the major browser compatibility challenges below:

• As we all know that, multiple browsers have different and unique ways of interpreting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. So, it becomes almost impossible for the application developers to implement a unified solution for all browsers.

• The modern device industry is highly fragmented, and it ranges from high-end smartphones to old desktop computers. This massive device fragmentation adds an extra layer of complexity while implementing browser compatibility testing.

• Moreover, when you are trying to combine operating systems with the browser compatibility test cases, you will see that each OS has its own unique style in rendering the web content. So, maintaining a unified infrastructure will be a massive challenge for the modern testers.

• Various market studies show that more than 75% of the end users do not update their browser versions. So, while implementing browser compatibility testing, it becomes increasingly difficult for the app developers to maintain user experience while maintaining compatibility with these outdated browser versions.

• As testers, we must accept that not all browsers support the latest web technologies and standards uniformly. So, we have to add various compatibility layers to run these new features on outdated versions.

Testing And Debugging Strategies For Browser Compatibility

To ensure browser compatibility across multiple devices and platforms, the application developers and testers will have to adopt certain advanced testing and debugging strategies to educate the new testers. To shed more light over the segment, we have mentioned some of the most important ones on this list:

Manual Testing

This is the traditional way of verifying the performance of a web application in this format, and the individual human tester has to verify the performance of the test cases one by one. Manual testing is still relevant for verifying certain elements that are often missed by automated test instances.

The following checklist will help you implement manual testing while trying to ensure browser compatibility on multiple platforms:

• First, begin with testing on popular modern browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.

• Proceed to ensuring the compatibility of web application on multiple devices like desktops, smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

• Finally, you have to wrap up this process by executing the best instances on different operating systems, which will include Windows, MacOS, Android, Linux, and others.

Automation Testing

Automation testing is an advanced process which helps execute multiple different test instances automatically on the target devices and other configurations. This is the most suitable option when the developers are working on large complex app development projects.

While implementing automation testing, the application developers can use various dedicated automated testing tools and frameworks. For instance, Selenium is a household name when it comes to automated web application testing. On the other hand, Appium holds its ground for executing automated mobile application testing.

Continuous Integration

By integrating cross-browser testing into the continuous integration pipeline, the application testers can ensure that the compatibility issues are caught at the earliest stages of the development and deployment processes.

To shed more light over this segment, let us go through some of the most popular continuous integration tools that are available in the present market:

• Jenkins is an open-source automation server that the testers can configure to run cross-browser test instances.

• On the other hand, Travis CI is a cloud-based continuous integration service that integrates with GitHub and also allows the execution of cross-browser test instances.

Browser Developer Tools

Most of the modern browsers come with integrated developer tools that the testers can use to debug compatibility issues while executing the compatibility test cases. While using most of the popular browser compatibility tools, the testers will have access to the following features:

• It is possible to examine and modify the DOM and CSS elements on the go without the integration of any complex testing infrastructure.

• The developers will have access to a console window, which will help them to debug JavaScript code and also log the error messages.

• The network panel will provide a clear and comprehensive view to monitor network requests and also the responses during the test execution process.

• Finally, the testers can use the performance panel to analyze and improve the page load times to ensure that it is responsive even on outdated devices.

Best Practices For Ensuring Browser Compatibility

Now that we have understood how the developers can ensure browser compatibility testing across multiple devices and platforms, let us go through some of the best practices that can help to further streamline this process:

• The testers must adopt a progressive enhancement strategy which will focus on building a basic functional experience. Then, enhance it for more complex inclusions. This adoption will ensure that the code functionality is available to the users at all instances.

• We advise the testers to not rely on browser detection and instead use feature detection for determining whether the browser supports a particular feature. Various tools like Modernizer can help detect CSS3 and HTML5 features. The following code snippet helps shed more light over the feature direction process.

• Responsive web design allows the developers to ensure that the website can adapt to different screen sizes and orientations. This implementation will provide a consistent user experience irrespective of the device or usage condition. The testers can also apply different styles based on the device’s characteristics, including height, width, and resolution.

• Cross-browser testing helps the developers to verify the performance of an app across multiple operating systems, browsers, and devices. The developers can also use cloud platforms like LambdaTest to initiate automated cross-browser testing on their web applications.

• We also advise the testers to use CSS research and normalization techniques to help create a consistent base style across browsers. Using this implementation, the application testers can tackle the differences in the rendering styles and formatting styles of multiple browsers of multiple browsers.

• The testers can use vendor prefix screenshots so that browser vendors can add support for new CSS features before they are fully standardized. To perform this process, the application testers can use tools like auto prefixes, which also help automate this integration. We have mentioned a sample code snippet that helps implement this process.

Role of Tools for Cross-Browser Compatibility

The application developers and testers can indicate various tools and platforms to further improve the scope of the cross-browser compatibility testing. To spread more awareness regarding this segment, we have included some of the most popular tools for this purpose:

1. Modernizer

Modernizer is a JavaScript library which helps the tests to detect HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user’s browser. This implementation allows the testers to conditionally load policies or follow back the code. It also helps to add a compatibility layer to run the latest features on outdated browser instances.

2. LambdaTest

Cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest allow the testers to execute the test instances on more than 3000 different combinations of real devices, operating systems, and browser instances. Using LambdaTest, the app developers can also initiate automated cross-browser testing in a parallel configuration.

The AI-orchestrated infrastructure of this platform allows the developers to efficiently manage and execute their test instances. Some of the other unique features of this cross-device testing platform include comprehensive test reporting, live test activity logging, and native bug tracking capabilities.

3. Babel

Babel is a JavaScript compiler that helps the testers to convert modern JavaScript, ES6 and further beyond, into a backward compatible version. Using this implementation, the testers can ensure that the code can run on older browser instances.

The Bottom Line

Considering all the arguments that we mentioned in this article, we can safely conclude that ensuring browser compatibility across multiple devices and platforms is a very important aspect of modern web development. By adopting all the advanced strategies mentioned in this article, the testers can create web apps that provide a consistent and enjoyable user experience for all users.

Finally, we would like to advise the testers to regularly test their applications both manually and in an automated format to identify and address compatibility issues at the earliest stages of the development cycle. This practice will not only help mitigate crucial errors but also detect the bugs before they can harm the core functioning of the app development cycle.