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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?

#61

Post by amitp »

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.

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.

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

#63

Post by mindcrime »

Not just cross-brower, but its still important to test unique client operating systems as well. Else you get weird crap like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/yfjaa1/disn...

I just ran into this bug myself like two days ago, when Disney+ just up and quit working. And even better, if you apply the UA string hack to work around that, it breaks Netflix! I had to, for the moment, install a browser extension that allows persistent site-specific UA string overriding. And sure, that works as such, but c'mon... this is bullshit. People, test your dang websites on more than Chrome on Windows for FSM's sake.

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

#65

Post by NoboruWataya »

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.

The Irish tax authority's login portal is completely broken in Firefox. It's the only website I need to have a separate Chromium install for.

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

#66

Post by klardotsh »

patrakov wrote: post #21
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Maybe they are not using Firefox, because your site is broken in it, and they have no other way to tell you this?

I gave up on Firefox and went back to Blink (via Qutebrowser) in part because of Mozilla's countless recent breakages, regressions, and inexplicable decisions, but in other part because of exactly this problem. So many sites just break in mysterious ways on Firefox, and the reason why is inevitably some exception raised 50 frames down the stack in an obfuscated bundle of $FRAMEWORK_DU_JOUR goop I can't even begin to debug.

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

#67

Post by spinlock »

Look at your analytics and see which browsers your users are using. Sometimes, I’ve worked on apps without a big userbase but we had to support IE because a big percentage used it.

You’ll probably find out that you don’t have too many browsers that actually matter.

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

#68

Post by comprev »

I worked with a client last year who had a firm requirement of IE6 being 100% compatible. No fancy CSS just plain old hand coded HTML. Lightning fast performance mind!

It was an e-commerce site which sold _very_ grey area products (most were banned from Amazon/eBay/FB Marketplace/etc.) and the ancient IE spec gives you an idea of the demographic they ~exploited~ sold products to ...

The market for selling questionable medicinal pills is much much larger than I could have ever imagined. Absolutely mind blowing!

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

#70

Post by BenjiWiebe »

thepra wrote: post #53
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...

Google CAPTCHAs work in Firefox for me, on multiple devices and OS's.
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