Cross Browser Testing Tools–Reduce Browser Compatibility Testing Effort

Sometimes, testing on various browsers becomes a challenge for software test professionals & project teams. Running the test cases on all browsers makes the testing cost very high. Specially, it becomes a challenge when we do not have expert designers in the team or when we don’t have verification/validation phase at the time of screen design. This is the bad part. Now, let’s see what is good.

The best thing is that there are many FREE as well as paid cross browser compatible testing tools available in the market. On top of it, you can do your job with most of the FREE tools. If you have very specific requirements, then you may need to have a paid cross browser compatible testing tool. Lets have quick look on some of the best tools:

1. IE Tab: This is one of my favourite & best tools available for free. This is basically an add-on of Firefox & Chrome. With a single mouse click from within Firefox & Chrome, you can see how the webpage will view in Internet Explorer. It is very light.

2. Microsoft Super Preview: This is a free tool offered by Microsoft. It can help you to check the webpage on various versions of Internet Explorer. you can use it to test and debug the issues in layout. You can download it for free from Microsoft website.

3. Spoon Browser Sandbox: You can use this testing tool to test the web application on almost all major browsers like Firefox, Chrome & Opera. Initially, it supports IE as well, but for the last few months, its support for IE has been reduced.

4. Browsershots: Using this free browser compatibility testing tool, you can test the application on any platform & browser combinations. So, it is most widely used tool. Due to large combination of browsers & platforms, it take long time to display results.

5. IE Tester: Using this tool, you can test the web pages on various versions of IE on various Windows platforms like Windows Vista, Windows 7 & XP.

6. BrowserCam: This is a paid browser compatibility online testing tool. It’s trial usage allows you to test for 24 hours only with the screen limit of 200.

7. Cross Browser Testing: This is a perfect tool for testing the website for JavaScript, Ajax and Flash features on various browsers. It offers 1 week free trial. It is available @ http://crossbrowsertesting.com/

8. Cloud Testing: If you want to test your application’s browser compatibility on various browsers like IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, then this tool is for you.

Apart from these tools, there are few other tools like IE NetRenderer, Browsera, Adobe Browser Lab etc. By investing some time on RnD on these tools, you can save your huge effort with excellent Quality.