The days are getting longer but apparently not long enough for me to have written a May updates post. Oops! Here’s what’s new in the last two months.
Screenshot Improvements
We built our screenshot system in the early days of CrossBrowserTesting when the available technologies were very different. After years of incremental improvements, we’re finally devoting a large part to our Q2 to making our already powerful screenshot testing system into a premier Visual Testing tool.
So far, we’ve reduced the amount of time it takes for screenshots to complete by an average of 20 seconds. This included switching to Selenium’s screenshot functionality, which didn’t exist when we started building screenshots.
We have also given our Full Page comparisons an updated UI and brought it within our app to accommodate for some new things we’re still working on.
The old DOM-based comparison is still available on the results page, under the ellipses menu in the top right. We’re continuing to work on the comparison UI, so keep an eye on it!
Status Page
We have a new status page that can alert you when we’re down. You can subscribe to text or email notifications, or to our RSS feed. The data is powered by Alertsite, another great product in the SmartBear portfolio of Testing solutions.
We love hearing from our customers, but:
Hackathon
The CrossBrowserTesting team at SmartBear held a 2-day hackathon, and as it coincided with the season premiere of Game of Thrones, we had a Game of Thrones-themed hackathon. The teams chose houses and projects. The winner’s project was pushed to production. Other projects are in our backlog.
Our teams and their punny battle-cries:
- Stark – Fully-Headless Ned
- Targaryen – CSS AND BLOOD
- Lannister – We Make the Difference
- Night’s Watch JS – Frameworks gather, and now my watch begins
- Bolton – Our Knives are Sharp
SPOILER ALERT – Our team’s performance accurately predicted the series’ ending House Targaryen came in 2nd, both in our hackathon and in the series. House Stark won the crown, with their Fully-Headless Ned project.
Their battle-cry was also an insight into their project, as it involved headless Chrome! Using our existing screenshot service, we now also run a Lighthouse audit using headless Chrome. This provides actionable items for you to improve the performance, accessibility, and SEO of your site, all while you’re visually testing your site. To learn more about how to use our results, read our help documentation.
New Browsers and Operating Systems
We released Chrome 73, Chrome 74, Firefox 66, Firefox 67, and Opera 60 for testing. Opera skipped version 59.
We updated our iPad Pro to iOS 12.2, previously running on iOS 10. This update allowed for faster interactions and more uptime.
Bug of the Month
We discovered that we had some Selenium sessions that seemed to be idle. Idle sessions would occur when a user cancels a CI job, in Travis for example, which kills the virtual machine. There is not a way to clean up after this happens and we would never receive notification that the session had ended, keeping the parallel in use. We now have a timeout capability for Selenium tests. Adding “idle_timeout” and a value in seconds allows users to set a timeout time, and we default it to 3 minutes otherwise.
Try out all the new improvements for yourself. Log in now to get started.
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