Adobe Shuts Down Browser Testing Service BrowserLab 40
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe has shut down its BrowserLab service, used by many for testing content across multiple desktop platforms. The company pointed its customers to two alternatives: BrowserStack and Sauce Labs. BrowserLab offered cross-browser testing by producing screenshots of websites from various browsers across Windows and OS X platforms. It was very useful for developers looking to support as many different users as possible."
Singular vs. plural (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Singular vs. plural (Score:5, Informative)
because Microsoft isn't good at allowing IE versions to sit side-by-side.
And by that you mean you can't do it at all. MS sometimes is nice and supplies VMs with new versions of IE preinstalled, but not always.
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12 GB and requires Windows 8 (Score:2)
So in order to test on every browser without having to own multiple computers, one would have to replace o
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You can use the VMware conversion center to convert VirtualPC images to VMWare, but it's dodgy.
No IE10 is a real issue. You can run it in Windows 7, but the Metro version is different than the desktop version, even in Windows 8.
Re:12 GB and requires Windows 8 (Score:5, Informative)
ievms has automatically handled setting these images up under the cross-platform VirtualBox for years. Nevertheless, you were pointed at outdated tools. You should be looking at modern.ie [modern.ie], where Microsoft offer virtual images for multiple virtualisation systems running on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Doing a decent job of testing for web developers is expensive. Buying a Mac isn't a big deal. second-hand Mac Minis are cheap. It's the mobile devices you need to worry about - and no, something running on your computer is not an adequate substitute.
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You should be looking at modern.ie [modern.ie], where Microsoft offer virtual images for multiple virtualisation systems running on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that site.
Re:12 GB and requires Windows 8 (Score:4, Interesting)
That's what makes android QA so damned expensive at our shop. If a client says we want iOS compatibility and Android compatibility we have to specify on the Android that it's the Nexus phone and tablet that we only QA against running latest version of android. If they want QA on Samsung devices, well it's $X,XXX per device and $YYY per OS version per device.
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Then again, if you're making anything IE6 compatible now a days, you should be shot.
out of a cannon...
into a porcupine ranch!
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If you're making anything IE6 compatible now a days, you should be shot.
The question is- why? Do web designers have the responsibility to actively force people off IE6?
I have to admit that- from a selfish point of view- I'm glad Google, MS etc. decided to stop supporting IE6 and start carrot-and-sticking people off it, because (aside from the security issues) IE6 was a nonstandard piece of crap that consumed time getting things to work and required bloated, stupid hacky code that got in the way of a more modern design and wasted time and resources that could have been much be
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IETester can and will render things differently to Internet Explorer. If you are using that to test, you aren't testing if your websites are compatible with Internet Explorer, you are testing if they are compatible with IETester. There is no point testing in something other than Internet Explorer if you want to know if something is compatible with Internet Explorer. Use the virtual images.
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because Microsoft isn't good at allowing IE versions to sit side-by-side.
And by that you mean you can't do it at all. MS sometimes is nice and supplies VMs with new versions of IE preinstalled, but not always.
Try this [utilu.com] - it's a bit of a hack job, but it does bundle the genuine versions of Trident for each IE.
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Or... one needs a Mac-compatible VM host with VMs running OS X, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Ubuntu, MiNT, FreeBSD, ChromeOS, Solaris, Android, iOS emulator, and maybe a few other niche OSes. Each VM can be cloned to have exactly one browser on it. Then, you just fire up all the VMs and point the browser at a location. You can even script a VM like VirtualBox to do this automatically, given a master feed, and spit back images of the sites... so you enter a uri into the controller and at the end of t
Expensive OS licenses (Score:3)
assuming you've got a Mac and licenses for the various Windows distributions you want to test.
My point is that that is a financially expensive assumption: $650 for a Mac mini and about $500 for Windows 8 OEM, Windows 7 retail, and Windows XP retail. Prior to Windows 8 [microsoft.com], OEM System Builder versions of Windows were not licensed for installation on a computer other than the one they shipped with.
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Yes, what you really need is an MSDN subscription... which is a bit silly (and expensive) purely for web development.
Alternatively, you can go for "good enough" and run the various IEs via WINE, and ignore the OS altogether.
$650 for a computer testbed environment that'll run just about everything (and is a decent development platform to boot) seems pretty inexpensive though, assuming you're doing professional web development. If you're not, why bother?
To build a portfolio (Score:2)
assuming you're doing professional web development. If you're not, why bother?
Perhaps one is doing amateur web development to build a portfolio to seek a professional web development position. Someone who has yet to move out of his parents' home for the first time or scraping by on unemployment insurance might not be able to afford $650 as an impulse buy.
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assuming you're doing professional web development. If you're not, why bother?
Perhaps one is doing amateur web development to build a portfolio to seek a professional web development position. Someone who has yet to move out of his parents' home for the first time or scraping by on unemployment insurance might not be able to afford $650 as an impulse buy.
Amateur web development can be done to amateur standards. Taking a few community college courses in design (at which point you get access to all of the equipment too) would be a definite benefit. Either way, the $650 isn't an impulse buy (I hope) but a business investment. If you're looking to be hired by a business, they look at more than your site portfolio, as they're going to want to train you in their own way of doing things. If you're starting your own business, you're going to need to actually st
Site that works in everything but Safari (Score:2)
And, as I pointed out, most people can make do with the equipment they already have, a few free to acquire add-ons, and the same kind of know-how they'd need to produce a modern web site of good quality in the first place.
The problem I'm foreseeing is that one might make a "modern web site of good quality" that works fine in Chrome, Firefox, and IE 10, and not discovering until it's too late that the site breaks in Safari and the employer uses Safari.
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Not useful (Score:3)
No, it was useful for developers looking to cut corners. Screenshots simply aren't a reliable way of testing something that the user will be interacting with. For instance, one particularly nasty Internet Explorer 6 bug made all the text on a page disappear - but only when the window was resized. There are some Android bugs where the tap target for links is different to where they appear on screen. Some Internet Explorer 8 bugs only manifest themselves while something is being animated.
Aside from the inherent limitations with a screenshot service, I've personally witnessed cases where this tool renders things differently to how a genuine browser renders it. It looks suspiciously like they were using a technique similar to IETester, because they got identical things wrong. A genuine copy of Internet Explorer 6 was rendering something one way, and this tool was showing Internet Explorer rendering something a completely different way.
The only reliable way of testing websites is with virtual machines. It's a little resource intensive, but it guarantees that you are testing with the actual browser and not with some Frankenstein reproduction, and it lets you replicate how a user actually uses the website - which is not by passively looking at it without any interaction.
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Even that isn't enough. I had a nightmare of a time identifying an IE7 bug due to a race condition. Our QA team (at a different office) was able to reliably reproduce it on physical hardware, but I couldn't in VMs because they ran slow enou
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Agreed.
I did find it useful, for a short period of time, when I was greener to the web development industry. But in practice it just didn't provide proper feedback.
Lot Less Useful, These Days (Score:4, Informative)
The Web standards are being followed a lot more closely by browsers. Of course, Microsoft doesn't believe in rounded corners (Anyway, I think that may be patented [theregister.co.uk]).
IE7 sucks just about as bad as IE6, but I keep a VM with IE7 (Vista) around for extreme testing.
Most of the issues I encounter these days come from JavaScript/DOM differences, and this service was worthless for that. I need to have VMs on my Mac with multiple versions of browsers. For this kind of testing, Macs are extremely useful, as I can run a full LAMP server on my Air, and run multiple VMs that connect to it as external sites. I can tweak in realtime.
VirtualHostX [clickontyler.com] is also pretty useful, as I can develop sites on my laptop, then directly transition them to the server with no fiddling with mod_rewrite or DB settings.
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IE9 supports rounded corners just fine...
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IE9 supports rounded corners just fine...
Cool.
I do most of my testing with IE7 and IE8 (and tend to want to support IE8), but I just set up an IE9 and an IE10 VM. I haven't really started testing with them much. That phase begins this weekend.
crossbrowsertesting.com was always a better option (Score:1)
With that service you can VNC/Remote Desktop into machines running just about any combination of technology that you want to test again. You can also do screen shots, but being able to click on a screenshot to remote in was always the real perk.
how long... (Score:2)