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Ask HN: What do you guys use to check browser compatibility

7 points by ValG ↗ HN
What do you guys use to check browser comp? Is there any software/plug-ins out there that work? Do you guys just do it the old fashion way? We're struggling with it (www.hangtrend.com)Advice? Thanks Val

8 comments

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raikia
Unfortunately, I just have a few different virtual machines with Windows XP (1 unpatched (IE6) and 1 patched (IE7)). I run Windows 7 with IE9 (if it works in IE7 and IE9, its a safe bet that it works in IE8). I also have Firefox and Chrome installed. If it works in Chrome, it (should) work in Safari since they both use Webkit. Lastly, I have 1 older version of firefox installed on one of my VMs (Firefox 3) because that is what my job still uses.

Anyway, it sucks. That's one of the reasons why being a web developer is grueling work, especially when working with older versions of IE. At this point, I pretty much just do a check to see if they are using a browser that has been released in the last 5 years. If they aren't, I display a warning (not an error) and say that the website might not function properly.

This can be a useful website though, if you are purely looking for visual compatibility: http://browsershots.org/

Hope this helps.

ValG
Raikia,

Thanks for the comment; It's so time consuming to have to have so many different builds/specs to check out the compatibility. Sounds like a start-up in the making. The browsershots.org site is really cool; great for a quick visual spot check. Thanks again!

humbledrone
I recently started using http://www.browserstack.com/ , after finding out that my web app did not work properly with touch devices (e.g. the iPad). They let you your any browser and OS you can think of (including iPad Safari), and surprisingly, the latency is actually not that bad (they're basically giving you a remote desktop by streaming video).

If you want to Do It Right™, and have the time to set it up, I think the best thing to do is to set up a Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org/) grid that has either VMs are standalone machines running all the browsers that you want to support. Then you can write tests that automatically verify that important features work everywhere. This doesn't completely obviate manual QA testing, but it can help a lot.

ValG
Browserstack seems really cool, we'll check it out; thanks humbledrone