CrossBrowserTesting.com

A Design, Development, Testing Blog

Too Many Browsers. Not Enough Space!

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We recently surpassed the 1500 browser & devices threshold, a huge milestone for us! The engineering effort involved in providing all these browsers across a wide breadth of operating systems and physical devices takes people and patience… and we were getting crowded. New digs were desperately needed, as we had new hires working off of cardboard tables (just joking…). We found a great location just down the street from our current office at the time and settled on it quickly. It was an older building, but we were immediately drawn to the large private patio outside, windows, and green space.

Things we love:

  • The outside work area. Going to be great in the Fall and Springtime for BBQs, Cornhole, and of course working.
  • The white boards. Went with Quartet glass white boards that we ordered from Amazon. Relatively inexpensive at around $350 each, but MUCH nicer to write on and we put them everywhere.
  • We took out a ton of walls in the office, exposing the windows and removing the dated ‘compartmentalized’ office layout. No cubes here, just peace and collaboration.
  • Fancy Browser themed wall art in the entry-way. We’re obsessed with browsers and the internet – it’s literally what we do so we thought we could see our favorite logos every time we walk in the buidling
  • We have 2X the space as our old place! Room to spread out and GROW!

Had a great office warming party last Friday evening. Fun was had by all. Now… time to get back to adding browsers!

Ken, Mike, & Tony

Testing Your Site From Different Geo Locations

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testing geolocations

If you would like to see what users in other countries see when they visit your site, perhaps you are serving up different content or ads based on their IP’s geo location, then you will love this use of our Local Connection feature. It is straightforward and easy to use, works for live testing and browser screenshots, plus it is free!

By default, all of your testing comes through our servers here in the U.S. However, you can set the system so it uses your current location or that of another computer that has an http proxy running on it. If you are located outside the U.S. and want to see what your page would look like from your current location, just follow these simple steps:

1) Run a local connection by pressing the ‘Local Connection’ button in the Test Center.
2) Take the default ‘Internal Web Sites’ option, and click connect.

This configures your pc to act as the web proxy for all requests – all traffic on CrossBrowserTesting.com’s browsers that you launch are sent through your pc, so they will show your location.

To run from another location, you will need to have access to an http proxy in that location. To do that, we went to http://www.xroxy.com to find an open http based proxy. We filtered the list to show only http proxies. It might take you a couple tries to find one that works, though as you will see in the video below, my first pick worked great. The hardest part of this process will be finding an http based proxy that is open, available, and reliable…

Here is a quick video I recorded to show you how quick and easy it is. First, I connect and show that the browser is connecting from the U.S. and then I show how to make it appear we are browsing from China.

To get started with your own testing:
1) Run a local connection by pressing the ‘Local Connection’ button in the Test Center.
2) Select the ‘Advanced Options’ link under the ‘Internal Web Sites’ option.
3) Select ‘Your proxy server’, and enter the IP address and port of the proxy you want to use (122.72.80.107 port 80 in China was working when I recorded the video).
4) Press connect.

That’s it! Run your tests and you should see your location being reported as whatever country you chose. If you have geo based content and/or ads, you will be able to see if they are working as desired.

We hope you enjoy this feature. If you give it a try, let us know what you think.

Using #Tags In Notes

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We’ve just added the ability to add #tags to your notes. In addition , users can add notes at the top test level! Prior to this change notes could only be added to individual test results, like a Live Test Video or Screenshot Result. Now, the whole test can have a description.

Notes example image

When entering notes, users can use hashtags (#) to label or flag issues on tests and their results. These notes can be seen on the test history lists for quick reference.

There’s also now a Search link at the top of the app that allow you to quickly find tests by their tags or other search terms. You can even share those search results publicly with others working with you by creating a shared link to a search.

We hope our subscribers find the new functionality helpful in not only labeling tests but as a system for issue tracking directly on the CrossBrowserTesting.com website!

Joining The SmartBear Family

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We are happy to announce we are now part of the SmartBear Software family.

Who is SmartBear Software?

Glad you asked. SmartBear builds software quality tools used by more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries. They are the folks behind the popular testing tools TestComplete and SoapUI, as well as the killer open source API definition platform Swagger. Impressive, right?

What’s going to happen to CrossBrowserTesting?

The logo is going to change. What? You were expecting everything to change? One of the critical reasons we decided to join the folks at SmartBear is because they are equally pumped about turning CrossBrowserTesting into the #1 cloud testing platform in the world. The resources and investment from SmartBear will enable us to build a bigger and better product much faster than doing it on our own.

To give us full autonomy, the team at SmartBear has decided to maintain CrossBrowserTesting as a standalone service with Memphis continuing to serve as our headquarters. In fact, we just signed a 5-year lease for a larger office right here in Memphis. So don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere.

SmartBear has an exceptional track record in acquiring companies and allowing them to focus on making their products better. Take the recent acquisition of Swagger. Since acquisition, Swagger has continued to innovate and accelerate its product development process with new offerings such as SwaggerHub.

The SmartBear team brings their deep expertise and understanding of the testing market and we look forward to working with them.

What happens to my customer account?

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Your account does not change in the slightest. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us, we will be here to answer just as we always have.

A very genuine thank you to all our customers!

Without the support and love of our customers, we wouldn’t have made it this far. So we want to thank all of you. Your comments, suggestions, and feedback have been critical in developing a tool that people love. We look forward to continue serving you and showing you the new stuff we are working on.

Ken, Mike & Tony

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