About cross-browser testing

An important task for Web designers and developers is cross-browser testing. Who makes us live in this happy and painful age? There are so many browsers in front of us, and ie6. This article describes various problems and knowledge related to cross-browser testing, including rendering, platform, device, and JavaScript Engine.

Fantasy five combination

In those days when Internet Explorer dominated the world, Web designers often fall into a verbal war with their competitors. However, when some new browsers that focus on Web standards appear, things have changed, the dominance of IE is challenged. The emergence of mobile browsers and new rendering engines allows Web designers to consider cross-browser testing. Today, Web designers gradually pin their targets on five or six major browsers, but things are not fixed, and it is always a dream.

Although the browser market is dominated by five browsers, the other half of the market cannot be ignored.

In general, cross-browser testing is intended for different rendering engines. If you have tested mainstream rendering engines such as Trident, Gecko, Webkit, and Presto, it seems to be safe. However, testing for a wider range of devices and platforms is still necessary to help you discover many potential problems.

 

Trident (Internet Explorer), Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Chrome and Safari) and Presto (Opera ).

Basic Testing

Currently, a serious problem is device relevance. Apple refused to support Flash on the iPhone and iPad, and the attacks between Apple and Adobe were endless. Although Flash is responsible for Content Rendering, it is imperative to expand the scope of your testing because it is still insufficient to detect potential problems only in mainstream browsers.

Flash renders content by itself, but not all browsers support Flash.

Another problem is the rendering engine version. It is important to support the latest version. However, many devices are still using the rendering engine of the old version, which requires us to test the new and old versions of the rendering engine at the same time.

Internet Explorer 6.0 uses the BUG-heavy old Trident Rendering Engine

Rendering Engine problems exist not only in versions, but also in different platforms and devices. There is no doubt that testing various devices will drive you crazy. It is not easy to design small screens, especially when no agreement is reached between different devices. This exists in the middle of the desktop system. The same rendering engine remains slightly different on different platforms.

A List Apart attaches great importance to rendering differences. They simply designed separate versions for mobile devices.

In addition to rendering differences, cross-browser compatibility also has a more important issue, the javaScript engine. In the early days, the only question people had about JavaScript was whether to enable it. But now, different browsers with the same rendering engine often have a very different JavaScript Engine. You need to test the performance of JavaScript against different browsers, especially when you use a large number of jQuery results.

This is a Chrome test site used to demonstrate the performance of Chrome's JavaScript.

Finally, it is an accessible problem. You must understand that when someone with some obstacles accesses your site, the Accessibility problem forces them to use only some browser. In this case, remember, you cannot ignore these people who are often forgotten.

Although Opera only occupies a small market share, its voice functions mean all

Long Term

Accessibility issues, different JavaScript Engines, cross-platform issues, rendering differences, technical dependencies, and other issues can cause you to sigh, but this is not enough. You need to study your target users. Spend some time communicating with your visitors to meet their needs. For example, if you use a vote to count the distribution of the browsers used by your visitors, you will eventually find that, you may also need to design for mobile browsing or iPhone.

Similar statistics can help you understand the distribution of browser visitors to your site.

Rendering engines on different platforms

The following is a list of browser rendering engines for mobile and desktop platforms. We will see more and more browsers available, so we need to consider them for the future.

There are a considerable number of rendering engines on both the desktop and mobile platforms.

The following browsers use the Trident Engine

The following browsers use the Gecko Engine

The following browsers use the Webkit Engine

The browser using the Presto engine is mainly limited to Opera

Summary

Maybe your website does not have any errors, and it may look great on every occasion. However, for real cross-platform compatibility, the test on five browsers is still not enough. If this article only teaches you one thing, it will take time to communicate with your visitors and analyze their needs. In addition, it takes time to test the performance of each rendering engine on various platforms and devices for different JavaScript Engines. In a Web-dominated world, it is worthwhile to spend time extending your website to as many people as possible.

 

This article is from international sources: webdesignerdepot.com Browser Testing: A Family Tree (Author:Alexander Dawson)

Chinese compiling Source:Ruishang enterprise CMSWebsite content management system official website