Your website must work across browsers to provide a consistent and compelling user experience. Browser testing improves user happiness and website credibility by identifying and fixing compatibility problems. Browser testing is crucial to web development. It checks webpages and apps for compatibility with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge online.
Testing catches functionality and performance issues that might impair users’ interactions with your site. Formerly the most popular browser, Internet Explorer (IE), is now a legacy. Although outdated, many corporate settings still use it, requiring maintenance and testing. Microsoft Edge, IE’s replacement, has evolved. The current version, based on Chromium, improves speed, security, and compatibility, making it a contemporary IE alternative.
This article discusses online tools for testing Internet Explorer and Edge. Developers and QA specialists may efficiently assure cross-browser compatibility and user experience using these tools. Understanding these tools will help optimize your process and guarantee your site works across various browsers when upgrading or creating new projects.
What is Browser Testing?
Testing and validating a website or online application’s operation and performance and looking across various web browsers is known as browser testing. Using this technique, websites are guaranteed to function correctly no matter which browser a person uses to see them.
Critical Aspects of Browser Testing
Here are some of the critical aspects of browser testing –
- Compatibility: Works with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, and Edge. Each browser interprets HTML, CSS, and JavaScript differently, causing rendering and behavior issues.
- Performance: Measures website performance, responsiveness, and resource consumption. Optimizing for browser performance disparities improves user experience.
- Rendering: Verifies browser uniformity in website layout, styles, and look. Different rendering engines might create element display differences, impacting site visual integrity.
- Functionality: Checks that forms, buttons, and navigation menus operate in each browser. Test JavaScript and other dynamic material for complete operation.
- Responsive design: A responsive design makes the website mobile-friendly and adaptable to different screen sizes and orientations. Browser testing checks site responsiveness across devices and browsers.
Importance of Browser Testing
The following points highlight the key reasons why browser testing is essential:
1. Ensuring Cross-Browser Compatibility
A website’s appearance and functionality may vary depending on how browsers interpret HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Browser testing ensures that:
- Consistent User Experience: Users have a uniform experience regardless of their chosen browser, minimizing frustration and confusion.
- Functionality Verification: All interactive elements (forms, buttons, navigation menus) work correctly across all browsers.
2. Enhancing User Experience
Retaining visitors and promoting engagement requires a smooth and consistent user experience. Browser testing assists in identifying and resolving problems that might impair the user experience, such as:
- Layout and Design Issues: Ensuring the visual design is consistent and appealing on all browsers.
- Performance Optimization: Finding and fixing performance bottlenecks for quick load times and smooth interactions.
3. Increasing Reach and Accessibility
The environment of some users may impose restrictions on their browser preferences (for instance, corporate settings might call for specific browsers). Ensuring compatibility across browsers increases your website’s reach:
- Inclusivity: Make sure your website works for all browsers.
- Broader Audience: Serving a wide range of people by working with older computers like Internet Explorer and newer ones like Edge, built on Chromium.
4. Improving SEO and Rankings
Search engines consider user experience and site performance significant factors in ranking algorithms. Browser testing contributes to better SEO in several ways:
- Bounce Rates: A well-functioning website keeps visitors longer, lowering bounce rates.
- Faster Load Times: Search engine results depend on website load speed. This may be achieved by optimizing for performance across browsers.
5. Ensuring Business Continuity
Ensuring cross-browser interoperability is essential for firms whose operations depend on online apps to sustain seamless business processes:
- Operational Efficiency: Making sure that customers’ and workers’ browsers can access internal and external web applications without problems.
- Customer satisfaction: Keeping consumers happy and fostering loyalty may be achieved by offering a dependable and consistent experience.
Challenges In Testing for Internet Explorer and Edge
Developers encounter the following significant obstacles:
1. Legacy Issues with Internet Explorer
- Outdated Standards Support: Internet Explorer, particularly in its earlier iterations, only supports a few modern web standards, such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript ES6. Maintaining compatibility requires extra coding or the use of polyfills.
- Deprecated Features: IE supports features and technologies no longer in use, leading to potential conflicts with modern development practices.
- Limited Debugging Tools: Compared to more recent browsers like Chrome and Firefox, Internet Explorer has fewer sophisticated development tools, which makes it more difficult to debug and fix problems.
2. Differences Between Edge Versions
- Legacy vs. Chromium-Based Edge: Inconsistencies arise when Edge Legacy uses EdgeHTML and Edge New uses Chromium. Each version may need independent website testing to assure compatibility.
- Feature Discrepancies: Certain features and APIs available in Chromium-based Edge may not be supported in Edge Legacy, requiring developers to implement conditional code or fallbacks.
3. Performance and Rendering Differences
- Rendering Engines: Internet Explorer uses the Trident rendering engine, Edge Legacy uses EdgeHTML, and the new Edge uses Chromium. Each engine renders HTML and CSS differently, leading to potential layout and styling issues.
- Performance Variations: Different browsers have varying performance characteristics, particularly in handling JavaScript execution and rendering complex animations or graphics.
4. Security and Compatibility Concerns
- Security Vulnerabilities: Internet Explorer is more vulnerable to security flaws than contemporary browsers. Ensuring web applications are secure across IE versions requires additional scrutiny and testing.
- Compatibility Modes: Internet Explorer’s compatibility modes (e.g., IE7, IE8 modes) can introduce unexpected behavior. Developers need to ensure that applications function correctly in these modes.
5. Lack of Support for Modern Features
- CSS Grid and Flexbox: Older Internet Explorer versions don’t support these. Thus, fallbacks are required.
- JavaScript Features: Promises, async/await, and modules may not be supported, requiring Babel to convert JavaScript to ES5-compatible code.
Advanced Features of Online Testing Tools
Advanced features in online testing tools improve browser testing speed and efficacy. These capabilities assist developers and QA teams in making websites and web apps robust, performant, and browser-compatible, including Internet Explorer and Edge. These tools provide these advanced features:
1. Automated Testing and Scripting
You may develop scripts to run tests automatically using automation testing. When the same tests must be performed again, regression testing benefits from this. Selenium, combined with a cloud-based platform like LambdaTest,it is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you run manual and automated tests at scale with over 3000+ real devices, browsers, and OS combinations.
2. Real-Time Testing and Debugging
Real-time testing simulates how visitors might use your website in various browsers. You can change the DOM, examine elements, and read console logs while browsing the site. Debugging tools improve development speed and accuracy by identifying and fixing bugs in real time.
3. Visual Regression Testing
Visual regression testing gathers screenshots of your website’s pages from various browsers and compares them to baseline photos to find visual differences. This ensures that upgrades or new features keep the site’s design the same.
4. Integrations with CI/CD Pipelines
CI/CD pipelines using browser testing technologies automate and simplify testing across the development lifecycle. Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI integrate. During build and deployment, this automatically runs tests to discover errors early and maintain quality code.
5. Performance and Load Testing
Performance testing capabilities assess your website’s performance under varying network speeds and significant user loads. Load testing simulates many concurrent users to find bottlenecks and stress areas. Performance and load testing tools help you improve your site for speed and scalability.
6. Cross-Device and Cross-Platform Testing
Advanced testing tools ensure your website operates on computers, tablets, and mobile devices across many operating systems. This covers Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. Cross-device testing makes your site accessible and working on all devices.
Best Practices For Effective Browser Testing
Browser testing is essential to verify your website or web app works well across browsers and devices. Best practices may speed testing and improve site quality. Effective browser testing recommended practices:
1. Test Early and Often
Begin regular website or web application testing early in development. Early testing finds and fixes errors before they become complicated and expensive. New code is tested during development to avoid regressions and problems.
2. Prioritize Browsers and Devices
Prioritize testing on your target audience’s preferred browsers and devices. Focus on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, Edge, and their most popular versions. Test on PCs, tablets, and smartphones for consistency.
3. Use a Mix of Manual and Automated Testing
Leverage both manual and automated testing to cover different aspects of browser testing. Exploratory, usability and visual testing need manual testing. Automated testing is ideal for regression, performance, and repetitive jobs. Combining both approaches ensures comprehensive coverage and efficient testing.
4. Implement Cross-Browser Testing Tools
Use cross-browser testing tools to streamline testing. These solutions let you test on several browsers and devices in the cloud without an extensive testing infrastructure. They provide automated, real-time, and visual regression testing.
5. Create Detailed Test Scenarios
Develop detailed test scenarios that cover all critical functionalities and user interactions. Test scenarios should encompass normal user processes, edge situations, and input devices, including keyboard, mouse, and touch. Test scenarios improve thoroughness and limit the possibility of overlooking critical problems.
6. Perform Responsive Design Testing
Make sure your website is responsive to multiple screen sizes and orientations. Ensure the layout, content, and interactive components work on PCs, tablets, and phones. Simulate screen resolutions and devices using browser developer tools like responsive design mode or cross-browser testing platforms.
7. Validate Performance and Load
Assess your website’s performance under varying network speeds and significant user loads. Perform performance testing to assess load, responsiveness, and resource use. Load test to mimic heavy traffic and find bottlenecks. Performance optimization improves the user experience and lowers bounce rates.
8. Check for Accessibility Compliance
Comply with WCAG criteria for website accessibility. Verify keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and other accessibility features. Accessibility testing enhances the user experience and makes your site accessible to disabled people.
9. Regularly Update Test Scripts and Scenarios
Update your test scripts and scenarios with the website or web application updates. Test cases should be updated often to include new features, functions, and design changes. This ensures that your tests remain relevant and practical.
10. Collaborate and Share Insights
The development, QA, and design teams may work together more effectively by exchanging test results, ideas, and comments. Use solutions that facilitate team cooperation and communication to ensure everyone is on the same page about the testing process and priorities. Working together improves testing process efficiency and speeds up problem-solving.
Internet Explorer and Edge use different rendering engines, have different legacy problems, and support various degrees of new web standards; testing in both browsers offers different obstacles. Maintaining the requisite browser versions and device support via internal infrastructure maintenance may be expensive, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. A cloud-based platform is helpful in this situation.
A popular cloud-based testing platform called LambdaTest handles the challenges of cross-browser testing, especially for Internet Explorer and Edge.
Both automatic and manual testing may be done using LambdaTest. With real-time testing, you can use many browsers to interact with your website and find problems as soon as they arise. By automating time-consuming tasks, automated testing using Selenium can efficiently perform regression tests while saving time and effort.
Due to its seamless integration with well-known CI/CD solutions like Travis CI, CircleCI, and Jenkins, this platform makes continuous testing possible across your development pipeline. By ensuring that every code update is tested across all necessary browser settings, this integration maintains the highest standards of performance and quality.
LambdaTest has debugging solid features, such as developer tools for network request capture, console log reading, and element inspection. These features help you quickly diagnose and resolve compatibility issues, enhancing your development workflow.
Conclusion
Ensuring your website or web application performs optimally across various browsers is critical in today’s diverse digital landscape.
Testing for compatibility in Internet Explorer and Edge presents unique challenges due to differences in rendering engines, legacy issues, and varying levels of support for modern web standards. To address these challenges effectively, leveraging online testing tools becomes essential.
