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Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#11

Post by tgv »

Depends on how critical it is for you/your company. I work on products that have internal tooling, and if they run on the latest version of Chrome, it's good enough (although I personally test them on Firefox, too, and someone used an older version of Safari the other day, and found a weird bug).

However, some of our tools are used by the general public (I've found the user agent for a coupon app as well as some PlayStation browser in the logs; might have been spoofed, of course). Those are written to the lowest common HTML/CSS/JS standards, so we don't try fancy features, and Babel or similar can be helpful. IE11 is out of grace, but we still support years old versions of most browsers, because it costs money and goodwill when too many fail.

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#12

Post by Izkata »

Nowadays the biggest issues are with CSS, and those frameworks won't help with that.

However, there are other CSS frameworks (Bootstrap/Tailwind/etc) that do.

Even using those, I'd still give other browsers a look over to see if anything looks odd. One weird one we had was, on Chrome/Edge a React dropdown looked fine, but on Firefox it was somehow positioned like 80px too high. I don't remember exactly what the fix was, just that it was a CSS problem and the original developer was relying on a Chrome default they didn't realize was there and not in other browsers. Something akin to "position: relative; top: 20px;" just happened to look vertically centered, but only in Chrome-based browsers.

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#13

Post by jfk13 »

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#15

Post by Arubis »

I consult, frequently jumping between web application codebases. Very often, I bring cross-browser testing with me by sheer nature of using Firefox when _everyone_ has been using Chrome exclusively for years. I end up finding issues; about half the time, clients don't care, because all their customers use Chrome.

This direction worries me (we did this with MSIE and it took a decade+ to heal those wounds).

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#16

Post by squeegee_scream »

PeacockTV has problems on Safari but just works on Firefox. This is just the most recent example I have of large companies whose site doesn’t work well on all browsers. So yes I think we should test on multiple versions of multiple browsers on multiple OSes

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#17

Post by TAForObvReasons »

jfk13 wrote: post #13

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#18

Post by andrewmcwatters »

Regardless if you're doing small personal projects or doing commercial work, personally I don't find it too time consuming to just breakout the latest versions of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox and do some local testing.

Any experienced software developer will have some experience testing against those. I don't think you need to go out of your way to test against specific builds of those browsers, with maybe the exception of Safari and Mobile Safari since I have noticed standards-compliant differences over time with older iOS devices.

That is to say, there isn't anything wrong with what Safari and Mobile Safari do, but the WHATWG living standards have changed over time just enough that older Apple devices may render web pages differently.

Try not to just limit yourself to Chrome though. And if you're using vendor extensions, don't rely on them, just use them to pretty up from your baseline designs.

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#19

Post by politelemon »

It's still relevant - there are enough differences between the browsers to render incompatibilities and bugs. It does also depend on how serious you are about your product, as some kinds of products not working in a browser can leave a very bad or frustrating experience.

It is of course painful to test in so many variants, so a decent compromise is often to just test in the latest version of all browsers. There's enough coverage there to help you find any potential problems.

Re: Ask HN: How relevant is cross-browser testing anymore?

#20

Post by golemiprague »

I have noticed that there are still vast differences in the printing functionality, both in terms of how things render and performance. So if you need to do any kind of printing in the app and you know your clients will use an array of different browsers it is worth checking it. Even within the same browser things tend to go back and forth when it comes to printing, Chrome for example tends to break things in one version and then they come back in the next one. It is a bit of a mess.
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