Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

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

#51

Post by thepra »

politelemon wrote: post #19

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 eno…

That's why I use only features that are cross compatible between browsers, even though I feel left behind on some new features only available on Chrome -_-

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

#52

Post by Macha »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #18

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 excepti…

Safari does require a Mac, so a little more time consuming unless you're already a Mac shop

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

#53

Post by thepra »

yeputons wrote: post #14

I have no idea about how relevant it is, but every few months I see a website which seem to be tested in Chrome only, because it blatantly don't load in Firefox or Safari. Like, at all, blank page. Or have some buttons like "Purchase" not working.

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...

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

#54

Post by Macha »

jitl wrote: post #45
sosodev wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absurd that Apple doesn't distribute Safari to other desktop platforms or at least make it source available so the community could compile it and fix bugs for themselves.

There was Safari for Windows back in the iTuned era.

iTunes would even try install it with iTunes updates at one point.

The fact that they ported the Mac font rendering stack to windows for it always made it stand out like an ugly duckling though

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

#55

Post by Macha »

thepra wrote: post #50
Arubis wrote: post #15

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).

Just tell them Chrome is going to become the next IE if everything only works on Chrome

More and more of them have never had to deal with web development in the era of IE

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

#56

Post by tinus_hn »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #17
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.

Possibly Firefox is making it very easy to block your statistics gathering. Besides, 7% is still quite a lot to throw away.

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

#57

Post by polygot »

It depends on your risk tolerance and how many DAU/WAU/MAU you have (and whether you're willing to have an untested experience for X users.) For example, I would test really old browser versions, and if there is a bad experience, you could let the user know to use a different browser or to upgrade.

My intuition says you'd get better value out of testing different browsers shallowly rather than 50 old versions of Chrome, though.

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

#58

Post by helsontaveras18 »

I experienced a DOM issue where a horizontal scrollbar was being rendered on some versions of Chrome running on Windows, some versions of Firefox on Mac, but I couldn't reproduce it myself (Chrome / Safari on Mac). It happens.

I don't QA for these things beforehand, but when they do occur, it helps to have a way to perform cross-browser testing to fix the bug.

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

#59

Post by sachinjain »

hebrox wrote: post #46

We'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?

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

#60

Post by XCSme »

n8cpdx wrote: post #24

Please test with Safari on desktop at least. I routinely find things that are just completely broken. And not small names, big names like Hulu, Clover, green chef, and others have just completely broken on Safari. Integration with Google’s captcha seems to be a common failure point. Also please consider writing your apps in a way such that they don’t completely shit the bed if your 600th ad tracker script fails to lo…

One issue is that Safari doesn't work on Windows. So, as a Windows dev, I am forced to buy a MacBook just to test on Safari. (I tried cloud testing services, but the experience is too poor and time-consuming).
Post reply on HN