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Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
81–90 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about the number of your users who are directly using Firefox; it's also about ensuring your code isn't inadvertently depending on non-standard Chrome quirks, and promoting standards compliance, portability, robustness, and such-like goodness on the web. (Test IE11 as well, by all means, if it's relevant to your users; but it's much less relevant to the future of the web.)
i’m just being silly when I ask this, but if you have data that most of your users, use Chrome, who cares if quirks that work in chrome don’t work and other browsers, if your users aren’t using those other browsers??
Well, that way you don’t contribute to making more difficult for people to change browsers.
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#83We're using Playwright [0] to do e2e testing. Locally I just run Chrome, but on CI FF and Safari are used as well. Using the official Docker image, this was really easy to setup. Because all browsers are automatically updated nowadays, we only test the most recent versions. A recent issue we found, was that Safari was responding different to some HTTP headers. [0]: https://playwright.dev/
Do you use any tool like Browserstack or Lambdatest or Saucelabs for running your tests across browsers? My question is if you have already invested in end to end testing automation then why not run in 10 browsers to be on safe side than running in only 3. Price?
If it adds value, I think it's a good idea. But less is more, so right now I'm not inclined to add more to our CI/CD pipeline.
In the future our application will need to be able to run on mobile devices. Then I think I want to test it on a recent iPad, iPhone and Android device. We'll probably be using one of the tools you mentioned.
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Painful as it is to admit, even Firefox is not worth testing. In our B2B site, more people are using IE11 than FF. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share at ~3% of overall share / 7% desktop-only share it's hard to justify putting extra effort.
It's around 3% of my pageviews as measured by javascript (e.g. statcounter) but it's 15-20% of my pageviews as seen in my server logs. Now, we might say that the server stats are wrong. But it could also be that the javascript stats are wrong, since firefox comes with tracker blocking. I don't know how to tell.
Honestly, the best way to tell is to create an api endpoint that just returns a 1px gif. Add that as an img tag on your site. Then look at the server logs for that endpoint. A curl-bot probably won’t call the endpoint, only browsers that are actually rendering the page. There are bots that actually render the page and run JavaScript, but you can usually look at the request’s ASN to help determine that.
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't tell you my distress when government websites use Google captchas and on Firefox you're stuck and can't go through your business...
Google CAPTCHAs work in Firefox for me, on multiple devices and OS's.
Do you work at Google maybe? They don’t work for me either.
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about the number of your users who are directly using Firefox; it's also about ensuring your code isn't inadvertently depending on non-standard Chrome quirks, and promoting standards compliance, portability, robustness, and such-like goodness on the web. (Test IE11 as well, by all means, if it's relevant to your users; but it's much less relevant to the future of the web.)
i’m just being silly when I ask this, but if you have data that most of your users, use Chrome, who cares if quirks that work in chrome don’t work and other browsers, if your users aren’t using those other browsers??
Maybe most of your users use Chrome because they don’t have a choice, i.e. the website is broken in other browsers.
Every time they bump into something they dislike about Chrome, they’ll remember who is forcing them to use it. When an alternative comes along and works in their browser of choice, they’ll switch and advocate for it.
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#87> Do we really need to test our code on 50ish Chrome versions, 25is Firefox versions and so on. Probably not, unless you're a really big outfit with a vast user base. But you should test on at least a recent Chrome version and a recent Firefox version, and probably Safari. And unless your product is irrelevant to mobile users, on both iOS (Safari) and Android (Chrome, Firefox), with both phone and tablet form factors…
You should probably test it on Safari as everything that runs on iOS will run through Safari.
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about the number of your users who are directly using Firefox; it's also about ensuring your code isn't inadvertently depending on non-standard Chrome quirks, and promoting standards compliance, portability, robustness, and such-like goodness on the web. (Test IE11 as well, by all means, if it's relevant to your users; but it's much less relevant to the future of the web.)
i’m just being silly when I ask this, but if you have data that most of your users, use Chrome, who cares if quirks that work in chrome don’t work and other browsers, if your users aren’t using those other browsers??
Do we REALLY want a repeat of IE?
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about the number of your users who are directly using Firefox; it's also about ensuring your code isn't inadvertently depending on non-standard Chrome quirks, and promoting standards compliance, portability, robustness, and such-like goodness on the web. (Test IE11 as well, by all means, if it's relevant to your users; but it's much less relevant to the future of the web.)
i’m just being silly when I ask this, but if you have data that most of your users, use Chrome, who cares if quirks that work in chrome don’t work and other browsers, if your users aren’t using those other browsers??
We should learn from what happened with Internet Explorer. It had a much larger share than Chrome has now, and a lot of people designed for IE first. The consequences were too many to write down in this comment. Let's just say there were some regrets :-)
We don't know how the situation will look like in the near future. If a large enough portion of the users switch to a different browser, it quickly becomes an issue.
It is in my opinion part of what companies should include in their risk assessments. Looking at the general trends, I would not be surprised if at least EU governments and institutions will ban Chrome due to privacy and data security. That will probably lead to others switching as well.
Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?
#90> Do we really need to test our code on 50ish Chrome versions, 25is Firefox versions and so on. Probably not, unless you're a really big outfit with a vast user base. But you should test on at least a recent Chrome version and a recent Firefox version, and probably Safari. And unless your product is irrelevant to mobile users, on both iOS (Safari) and Android (Chrome, Firefox), with both phone and tablet form factors…
Painful as it is to admit, even Firefox is not worth testing. In our B2B site, more people are using IE11 than FF. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share at ~3% of overall share / 7% desktop-only share it's hard to justify putting extra effort.
These numbers are problematic for two reasons. 1. This comes from client side tracking scripts which are now likely blocked in ff than Chrome.
2. Unless you're running a very low traffic site, it's not like 3% of users don't matter. 3% may mean millions of users.