Are you dreading the Ides of March? According to the History Channel, “the Ides of March once signified the new year, which meant celebrations and rejoicing.”
Positive or negative connotations aside, we here at CrossBrowserTesting have some great improvements that we hope bring you celebration and rejoicing.
Faster Mobiles – Scrolling, Clicking, FPS
Our mobile phones, especially the new ones, had been giving us some trouble recently (perhaps we’ll write up a technical blog post for our devoted readers) and were slow to respond. The default swipe mechanism from Appium could take 4-6 seconds, resulting in a poor experience. We figured out how to fix this, and now scrolling on our mobile phones should respond in under a second.
Secret tip: you can also now scroll by using the up/down arrows and page up/down buttons on your keyboard.
We also moved our new Android devices to stream video via WebRTC, which allows for smoother videos and animations.

New mobile response time on the left, old response time on the right
Your Browser, Our Operating System (OS)
By default, your browser now determines the resolution of the OS we give you. You can resize the OS just by resizing your browser. This allows you to get the maximum space to test your browser. You can always test your responsive designs by changing the browser window within our live test, but your web application may be dependent on the OS resolution. We still give you the option to choose from common resolutions if you only care about specific resolutions.
As part of this change, we now made the toolbar moveable and collapsible, so you get the resolution you asked for.
Mobile Swipe/Click Indicators
You can’t feel your clicks and swipes on our devices, so we added indicators to give you feedback when you were clicking and swiping.
New Browsers
Chrome 72, Firefox 65, Opera 58 were all released in early February. Chrome 72 for mobile is available on our Pixel 3s.
Bug of the Month – iFrames in R&R
We’re always fixing issues we’ve found — cross-browser testing is a hard problem, and providing cross-browser testing is an even harder problem. We had some issues recognizing and handling iFrames in our Record and Replay feature, and we’ve made it easier for you to edit your recorded script that contains iFrames to replay correctly.
These have been the highlights for February. Enjoy the Ides of March! We’ve got some exciting updates planned for March.
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