Testing ASP.NET Web Applications

7.6. Cross-Browser Testing

Although we have discussed cross-browser testing in Chapter 5, there are more issues than simply automation. The reality of web development is that you need to deal with cross-browser issues as each browser renders with your site in a slightly different way. Luckily there are some tools to help you and make the experience less painful.

The aim of cross-browser testing is to ensure that when users visit your site using a variety of browsers they all receive the same experience and can use your site as you expect. We have experienced a number of sites where you visit using one browser only to find large sections of the site completely broken and usable because they haven't been developed and tested with different browsers in mind.

One of the best tools available to help cross-browser testing is called BrowserShots (http://browsershots.org/). Simply enter a URL for a site as shown in Figure 7-1 and it will access the site using a variety of browsers which you can use to manually verify that the site renders correctly on almost every browser on every platform. The free version takes a while to complete all the tests and it only works against public accessible sites; however, it's a great way to validate the site.

The web page with the results is shown in Figure 7-2.

While validating across lots of different browsers is useful, the main problem with cross-browser is between the different versions of Internet Explorer (IE) such as 6, 7, and 8. At the time ...