In a digital world, your website is the first point of interaction between your brand and customers. The first impression you create for your customer is the most important factor in determining the standard of your brand. The performance, the design, and the navigation workflow should all work flawlessly to provide a state-of-the-art experience for your website visitors. Companies cannot afford to present a website with the slightest glitch. A broken link, visual discrepancy, or a non-functioning button can severely damage your website’s performance and your brand’s reputation. Hence, testing your website is of critical importance before you launch it in the market. Out of all the areas of testing, one that stands out most, especially in a web application, is browser testing. A site can function perfectly alright on Chrome, but may break on Firefox. There are a lot of reasons for such discrepancies.
This article specifically looks into this aspect of quality – cross-browser testing. We will understand it in detail, along with covering the related concepts that contribute to the overall quality of your website.
Cross-browser Testing in a Nutshell
When you launch your website, users may access it from diverse sources. They may open your website on different browsers, versions, or devices. There are pretty high chances that the site’s performance is not consistent across all the diverse scenarios when it is not tested properly. This is where cross-browser testing becomes relevant. It ensures that your web application performs consistently on all browsers, versions, and devices – both functionally and visually. It is easier to check the functionality of the website in all scenarios, but validating design consistency across different screen resolutions, sizes, and browser engines becomes a challenge, which is what cross-browser testing can effectively meet.
Benefits of Cross-browser Testing
There are many benefits of cross-browser testing when it comes to validating both technical and business requirements. Let’s uncover them all.
-
Visual Consistency
Each browser has its own rendering mechanism for CSS and HTML. This causes differences in the visual display of your website, even though the background code remains the same. A button that looks sleek and center-aligned on Firefox may appear misaligned on Chrome. Cross-browser testing’s most important benefit comes from catching these bugs early on. It ensures your website displays all its elements – buttons, images, icons, fonts – consistently across all browsers.
-
Improved Responsiveness
Responsive design is no longer an option, given that most of the web applications today are being accessed extensively on mobile devices. Your website should be responsive enough to adapt to the varying screen sizes and resolutions of different browsers on different devices. Cross-browser testing checks the site’s responsiveness on different combinations of browsers, devices, and OS’s. A Chrome browser can be tested on iOS, Safari on Android, Firefox on Windows tablet, and so on. There are numerous combinations you can test for compatibility.
-
Enhanced Accessibility
Inclusivity is one of the most important factors you must consider while launching your web app. For users with disabilities, accessibility features like WCAG emphasize scalable text, compatibility with screen readers, and color contrast. A cross-browser testing tool, like testRigor, ensures that the app remains accessible even when the user is zooming in or using an assistive tool with a browser. It improves the reliability of your application for a diverse range of users.
-
Builds Brand Reputation
Any company can launch a website these days with all the information and features available. What makes them stand out from the crowd is how professional and reliable their website appears to the users. A consistent and well-tested functionality of the application allows customers to build trust in your brand and associate it with high-quality standards.
Real-World Examples of Cross-browser Testing
So far, we have discussed the implications of cross-browser testing on generic web applications. Now, let’s get specific. Let’s examine its usage in three business domains – e-commerce, banking, and a SaaS product.
E-Commerce
One of the e-commerce vendors found that the product images load correctly on Chrome, but become disproportionate when displayed on a different browser. The underlying reason for that was the difference in the responsive image CSS rules in those browsers. Through cross-browser testing, they caught the issue early on and fixed it, thereby avoiding any risk to the brand’s reputation.
Banking Portal
A banking firm launched a new customer portal that required them to apply for loans online by filling up a form. What they noticed during cross-browser testing was that the form input fields were misaligned when the screen size became smaller on a mobile device. This allowed them to fix the issue much before they launched the site in production, which would have otherwise caused them to lose customers due to a bad user experience.
SaaS Product
One of the major pitfalls for a SaaS company is an error in its dashboard itself, which is its front face to the customers. A SaaS product’s dashboard used animated charts to display statistics. In their testing, they caught an error where the charts were getting loaded perfectly on Chrome and Safari, but failed on Firefox. This error arose due to the difference in the animation rendering process of different browsers, which the code didn’t take into consideration. They updated the code with a conditional process that would specifically run for the Firefox browser and provide the expected outcome.
Final Thoughts
No doubt, the website’s core functionality is its lifeline, but the visual part of it is what makes it accessible to the user. If there’s even the slightest glitch in the interaction between the user and application, it has a direct impact on your brand. Cross-browser testing is specifically performed keeping this in mind. It’s not just a part of design strategy but has a direct impact on your business. In today’s world, where customers expect flawless experiences and interactions at their fingertips, companies cannot afford to provide a website that produces adverse outcomes. The customers will keep on rising in their usage patterns through diverse browsers, devices, and platforms. It’s not under your control. But what you can control for sure is to turn your web application robust enough to give a high-quality performance in every possible scenario.
