ken's blog

Kutenda review of CrossBrowserTesting.com

The guys at Kutenda did a video review of CrossBrowserTesting.com. It does a great job of providing an overview of our service, explaining the value proposition for our business better than we do! To understand better what cross browser testing is all about, check it out at http://blog.kutenda.com/2010/06/website-testing-tip-browser-compatibilit....

CrossBrowserTesting adds a pool for summer - dive in!

What is summer time without a pool? We have been busy the last few months adding a pool at CrossBrowserTesting. Not a swimming pool... but a pool of prewarmed, ready to go live testing configurations. What does this do for you? It reduces the wait time when requesting a Windows XP, Vista, or Win 7 configuration from around 60 seconds to less than 30 seconds. It is a huge time saver!

W3C Validation Testing

Now our Automated Screenshot service provides W3C validation information for the provided test page! On the screenshot result page (see sample below), you will see a summary of any HTML and CSS validation errors/warnings with a link to the W3C validation website for detailed information.

This summary is also maintained for each version of screenshot tests you run. This means that as you review screenshot versions of your page, you can also review the number of W3C validation errors over time.

W3C Sample Image

Cross browser checks of pages behind a user name / password

Screenshots are a great way to check your site for layout/appearance issues. You can set up a test in just a minute, let it run, then scan through the results to see if there are problems. If you see a problem, you can use the 'live test' link to launch a vnc session to the particular configuration you have the issue in, and work in a live session to correct it... Very nice, and a great workflow!

Why IE6 still matters, even if you do happen to be a cross browser testing company!

This post should more properly be titled 'How could we be so arrogant' - read on to discover why.

First part of CrossBrowserTesting api released - automate your automatic screenshots

Our new api allows you to automatically trigger screenshots to run when needed. For example, lets say you have a script that pushes pages into production each night. You can modify that script to automatically tell CrossBrowserTesting.com to take screenshots of that page. You can then mail the screenshots of the updated page to your QC department when the test completes so they will be able to verify the layout.

You can view the cross browser testing api documentation.

Some details:
- We are using basic authentication to authenticate access to the api

Share your test results with customers and coworkers

Once you have found a cross browser issue with your site, you often need to communicate with others. Perhaps you need to send a screenshot of a page that renders incorrectly in IE to one of the developers or post a copy of it on twitter to see if any of your peers know a good work-around for the issue. Perhaps you need to send a link of a corrected web page to a customer.

Download your screenshots in a zipped file

Several customers have asked us to add the capability to download all the photos from an automated screenshot test all at once. We have added a zip download link to the bottom right of the view results screen which allows you to do this. Both the windowed and the full page screenshots are included in this file, and they are named so you can tell which operating system, browser, and resolution each screenshot was taken on.
Thanks!
Ken

Wow, everything is different!

We changed (a lot).

First, we are releasing into beta our new automated screenshot service! Secondly, we have a new look (with a shiny new logo!).

The whole site is now being driven by Drupal. We did that so we would be able to add content quickly and easily. We also added forums. We want the forums to be become useful for the community of web developers that use our site. We hope that the forums will become a place where web developers can talk either about their work or problems they are having doing cross browser testing.

New Screenshots Capability

Crossbrowsertesting.com now has automated screenshots.

We know that other sites have screenshots too. What we feel is the "killer" feature is the linkage to a live testing session.

With our screenshots you can take a screenshot and then quickly click into a live session for that screenshot. That means if you run a set of tests and see from a screenshot there is a problem you are only one click away from being able to see that web site in a live test.

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