Cross-Browser Compatibility: Why it matters and how to test for it?

Cross-browser testing means to ensure these components function seamlessly across all targeted browser versions. You can use it to ensure HTML, JavaScript, Applets, AJAX requests, Flash, and web design elements all look and behave as intended on every individual browser type. The overarching goal of cross-browser testing is to provide uniformity by enabling testers to detect bugs that might prevent a site from displaying or functioning properly across various screen dimensions and browsers.

Why Is Cross-Browser Testing Important?

Although it’s one of the biggest time-grabbers for QA and development teams, cross-browser testing is essential for delivering the best experience possible to users. Browser vendors follow Open Web Standards, but they have their own interpretations of it. Since they each render HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in unique ways, thoroughly debugging your website’s source code is not enough to ensure that your website will look and behave as intended on different browsers (or different versions of a single browser).

So it falls to web developers to abstract browser differences. Cross browser testing helps with that by pinpointing browser-specific compatibility errors so you can debug them quickly. It helps ensure that you’re not alienating a significant part of your target audience–simply because your website does not work on their browser-OS.

Which types of issues facing in cross-browser testing?

1. Different JavaScript implementation
2. Missing CSS resets
3. Font size and image orientation mismatch
4. No support for HTML5
5. Inconsistent page alignment
6. Layout incompatibility with browser
7. Mismatches in frameworks or library versions

What Measures Are Involved in Cross-Browser Testing?

Compatibility testing includes everything, but you may not always have the time for that. To do it right, product teams constrain their testing with a test specification document (test specs) which outlines broad essentials—a list of features to test, what browsers/versions/ platforms to test on in order to meet the compatibility benchmark, test scenarios, timelines, and budget.You can categorise the features that will undergo testing like this:

1. Base Functionality: To ensure that basic functionality works on most browser-OS combinations. For example, you could be testing to verify that:
2. All dialogs boxes and menus are working as intended
3. All form fields accept inputs after validating them correctly
4. Website handles first-party cookies (and features like personalisation that are dependent on them) correctly seamless touch input for mobiles or tablets.
5. Design: This ensures that the website’s appearance—fonts, images, and layout—matches the specifications shared by the Design team.
6. Accessibility: Accounts for compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to enable differently-abled users to access the website.
7. Responsiveness: Verifies that design is fluid and fits different screen sizes/orientations.