How to Test Website on Different Browsers (Complete Guide)

Testing your website on different browsers is essential to deliver a smooth user experience. Many websites look and function correctly in one browser but appear broken in another. This often leads users to believe the website is faulty, even though it may work perfectly in a different browser.

This happens because each browser interprets website code differently. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and other components are processed by different browser engines in their own way. As a result, some browsers may not fully support certain features or may render styles differently, causing layout issues or functional problems.

For example, CSS styles can behave differently in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which means the same page element may look or respond differently across browsers. These inconsistencies can negatively impact usability and user trust.

In this guide, you’ll learn why it is important to test websites on different browsers and the best ways to do it effectively.

Before exploring the methods to test websites across browsers, let’s first understand what cross-browser testing is and why it plays a crucial role in modern web development.

Read Also: Automate Cross-Browser Testing for Continuous Delivery

Why Cross-Browser Testing Is Important

All testing is aimed at providing users with the best possible experience. However, when you look at different browsers, you’ll notice that each uses a different back-end technology to render websites.

Chrome dominates the market due to its widespread use on Android and popularity on desktop computers; Safari, Edge, Firefox, and Chromium have a sizable market share.

The website browser compatibility test takes into account the differences among these browsers.

These are some points why website browser testing is important:

1. First, it examines how the code of a website adapts to different browsers.
2. Second, it assists designers and developers in identifying bugs, which can then be resolved as soon as they are identified.

When you test websites on multiple browsers, you may find these typical problems:

• Various JavaScript implementations
• CSS resets are missing
• A mismatch between font size and image orientation
• HTML5 is not supported
• Page alignment is inconsistent
• Incompatibility of the layout with the browser
• Misalignment of frameworks or library versions

You can test websites in different browsers to avoid these and many other pitfalls before launching your website or web app. You can do this with website cross-browser testing.

5 Key Reasons: Why Website Cross-Browser Testing Is a Must?

1. Ensures Consistent User Experience: Multiple Web browsers Testing ensures that your website visitors have a consistent experience, regardless of their browser.

Cross-browser testing is essential for software development because many different browsers, devices, and operating systems are available today.

Cross-browser testing ensures that all browsers, devices, and platforms have the same behaviour and experience.

2. Different Browsers Render Code Differently: The fact is that, depending on the web browser in which they are run, different client components produce different results.

Apple Safari’s text-to-speech feature, for example, will only work on macOS.

3. Variations in Web Technologies and Standards: From JavaScript to Applets and a slew of other technologies! Since the internet’s inception, website technologies have evolved dramatically.

As a result, website configurations have changed with the introduction of new web technologies, libraries, and frameworks such as HTML, jQuery, JSON, XML, and ReactJS, among others.

Continuous improvements in them over time have made cross-browser testing more critical than ever.

4. CSS & Technology Variations: CSS styles may appear differently in different browsers. For example, what works fine in Internet Explorer (now Microsoft Edge) may not work as smoothly in Google Chrome. This is something that can be detected and addressed through cross-browser testing.

5. Competitive Advantage: Ultimately! If you do not invest time and resources in ensuring cross-browser testing, your competitors will.

If you don’t want to disappoint your customers, you must treat the cross-browser compatibility issue with the seriousness it deserves.

What Is Cross-Browser Testing?

Cross-browser testing is the process of verifying that a website or web application works correctly and appears consistent across different web browsers, browser versions, operating systems, and devices. It helps identify layout issues, functionality errors, and compatibility problems caused by differences in browser engines, CSS rendering, and JavaScript behavior.

What Is Cloud-Based Cross-Browser Testing?

Cloud-based cross-browser testing involves running your website on remote devices (virtual or physical) and controlling them from your system.

The issue is that the website must be tested every time a new browser is released, which happens far too frequently.

Recently, privacy browsers like Duck-Duck-Go, Brave browsers, etc., were launched and have grown faster, so websites must be optimized for these browsers.

Even many mobile companies come with their own browsers, so websites should be optimized for these browsers as well.

With time, cloud-based browser compatibility testing has proven the best option for testing your website easily, quickly, and affordably.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Cross-Browser Testing

1. No Setup Fees: Cloud-based cross-browser compatibility testing eliminates the need for physical devices to be carried and maintained with different browsers and operating systems.

Furthermore, there is no setup fee; simply log in and begin testing on the platform.

2. Faster and Secure Testing Environment: Cloud-based cross-browser testing is rapid. You can test your website by switching between browsers and operating systems in seconds. All you need to work with is the cross-browser compatibility matrix, which displays the benchmark browser versions.

3. Easy Collaboration & Code Sharing: Cloud-based browser compatibility testing also ensures that the Selenium automation tests you tried to run on physical devices run smoothly on the remote system. In addition to Selenium, Cloud-based testing platforms offer a variety of languages for automating your tests.

4. Scalable Test Infrastructure: When it comes to cross-browser testing, scalability is not an issue. According to the website and the project’s scope, testing must always be scaled up and down. With cross-browser testing, you can scale as much as possible without worrying about different devices.

5. Improved Team Communication: Cloud-based cross-browser testing tools make it easier to share screenshots, comments, videos, and other project assets with various project teams, such as development, DevOps, and testing.

All teams viewing the results can work as if they were all in the same room. This results in increased testing efficiency and faster project delivery.

Cross-Browser Testing Process (Step-by-Step)

This cross-browser testing may appear time-consuming and frightening, but it doesn’t have to be you just need to plan carefully for it and make sure you do enough testing in the right places to avoid unexpected problems.

If you are working on a large project, you should regularly conduct regression tests to ensure that new features work for your target audience and that new code additions do not break previous features.

If you leave all testing until the end of a project, any bugs you find will be much more expensive and time-consuming than if you find and fix them as you go.

Four stages of workflow are:

• Initial planning
• Development
• Testing/discovery
• Fixes/iteration

Step 1: Test Planning & Browser Selection

During the initial planning phase, you will most likely have several meetings with the site owner/client (this could be your boss or someone from an external company for whom you are building a website) to determine exactly what the website should be, what content and functionality it should have, how it should look, and so on.

You’ll also want to know how much time developers have to develop the site, what their deadline is, and how much they’re going to pay you for your efforts at this point.

We won’t go into much detail here, but cross-browser issues can significantly impact such planning.

Once you’ve determined the required feature set and the technologies developer most likely uses to build these features, you should investigate the target audience — what browsers, devices, and so on will the target audience for this site be using?

The client may already have data on this from previous research, such as other websites they own or previous versions of the website you are currently working on.

If not, you can get a good idea by looking at other sources, such as usage statistics for competitors or countries that the site will serve.

Step 2: Development & Environment Setup

Now that the developer has identified issues, the developer should review the required feature set and the technologies needed to employ.

After each phase of implementation, you must test the new functionality. To begin, ensure that there are no general issues with your code preventing your feature from working. Buy Xanax in Norway. Xanax is not prescribed anymore

Test it in a couple of stable browsers on your systems, such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Internet Explorer/Edge.

Also read: Best Browsers for Android

Step 3: Test Execution & Defect Identification

Perform some low-tech accessibility testing, such as using only the keyboard or a screen reader, to see if your site is navigable.

• Try it out on a mobile platform like Android or iOS.
• Fix any issues you find with your new code at this point.
• Next, try expanding your list of test browsers to include all of your target audience’s browsers and begin focusing on eliminating cross-browser issues.
• Try to test the latest change on as many modern desktop browsers as possible, including Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Safari on desktop (Mac, Windows, and Linux, ideally).
• Test it in popular phone and tablet browsers (for example, iOS Safari on iPhone/iPad, Chrome, and Firefox on iPhone/iPad/Android). Also, test it in any other browsers you’ve included in your target list.

The most basic option is to conduct all of your tests independently. Wherever possible, you should try to test it on real physical devices.

If you don’t have the resources to test all of those different browsers, operating systems, and device combinations on physical hardware, you can use emulators and virtual machines instead. This is a popular option, especially in some situations.

For example, because Windows does not allow multiple versions of Windows to be installed on the same machine simultaneously, using multiple virtual machines is frequently the only option.

Another option is to use user groups, which involve testing your site with a group of people who are not part of your development team.

This could be a group of friends or family, a group of coworkers, a class at a nearby university, or a professional user testing setup in which people are paid to test your site and provide feedback.

Finally, you can improve your testing by using auditing or automation tools; this is a wise choice as your project grows more extensive, as doing all of this testing manually can take a very long time. You can use an automation testing tool

Step 4: Debugging & Fixes

When a tester finds a bug, the tester should try to fix it.

The first step is to narrow down the location of the bug as much as possible. First, obtain as much information as possible from the person reporting the bug, such as the platform(s), device(s), browser version(s), and so on. Then, test it on similar configurations to see how widespread the bug is.

Once you’ve determined what’s causing the bug, you must decide how to work around it in the specific browser that’s causing issues — you can’t simply change the problem code, as this may break the code in other browsers.

The general approach is to fork the code in some way, for example, by using JavaScript feature detection code to detect situations where a problem feature does not work and running different code in those cases where it does work.

After you’ve made a fix, you should repeat your testing process to ensure that your fix is working correctly and hasn’t caused the site to break in other places or browsers.

What Does Cross-Browser Testing Involve?

Visual verification is no longer sufficient for modern browser testing. It also includes testing the code’s unseen functionality and browser-related business logic. The engineer conducting the testing must ensure the following:

• Examine the user interface. Ensure that all user interface aspects are strictly according to the specifications and requirements.
• Check the code for accuracy. Ensure that the CSS and JavaScript are fully validated across all target browsers.
• Run the operation. Check to see if the site behaves consistently. Tabs, panels, links, popups, and navigation menus are all examples of this.
• Examine performance. Keep an eye out for performance issues, such as elements that load slowly or infrequently.
• Assess responsiveness. Is the site responsive to different screen sizes? You’ll need to consult with the product team to understand things here.

Also Read: Testing on iPhone 15 Devices: What You Need to Know?

Why and How to Automate Cross-Browser Testing

“Automating software testing is no longer rocket science; instead, it has become a standard practice among the testing community due to its numerous benefits. The situation is similar when it comes to cross-browser testing.“

Here are some of the benefits of automating cross-browser testing:

1. Saves Time and Reduces Manual Effort: Cross-browser testing necessitates continuous testing, which can be highly time-consuming when done manually. Thus, automating the testing process makes testing more accessible and faster, resulting in a shorter turnaround time.

2. Improves Bug Detection Accuracy: When the process is automated, it is easier to detect hidden bugs.

3. Enables Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Because the turnaround time for browser testing has shrunk dramatically, continuous delivery of new software code releases becomes more feasible and positively impacts the delivery pipeline.

Steps to Automate Cross-Browser Testing

Now that we understand what cross-browser testing is, why it is essential, and why automating cross-browser testing is a better approach, let’s look at how it can be accomplished in a few simple steps.

1. Define and Prepare Test Cases: Designing test cases is the most fundamental aspect of performing any type of software testing.

To create the most efficient test cases, you must first identify the factors to be tested. Next, determine the browsers against which compatibilities must be tested.

2. Configure Test Environments & Execution Strategy: Create an execution strategy that includes a different test scenario/environment for each browser. You will be able to test your application across thousands of browser and OS platform combinations as a result of this. As a result, your application will be as robust as possible.

You can accomplish this by following the framework-specific steps to create an execution strategy while automating the process and selecting the test suite and execution setup environment.

The process must be repeated for each browser-platform combination and can be sped up by running parallel tests simultaneously.

3. Integrate with CI/CD Pipeline: Integrate agile and DevOps teams using CI/CD tools. This ensures that the quality of your applications is maintained throughout the continuous delivery methods.

4. Analyze Results Across Browsers: Once you have received comprehensive test results and bug details, analyze them individually for each test environment to create more dynamic and customizable reports.

These include text logs, video recordings, screenshots, and other information to aid analysis.

5. Report, Debug & Re-test Issues: Now that you’ve completed the testing process, it’s time to report, catalogue, and troubleshoot the bugs that were discovered. For a faster resolution, you can use automated programs for this process.

Top Cross-Browser Testing Tools

1. TestComplete

TestComplete is one of the most user-friendly cross-browser testing tools and automated testing platforms, enabling teams of all skill levels to create and execute automated user interface tests for desktop, mobile, and web applications.

TestComplete helps accelerate testing cycles, improve software quality, and ensure that your applications work as intended.

Key Features of TestComplete: 

• A functional test automation tool for creating and running tests on any web application’s user interface.
• You can get real-time access to the latest devices and browsers by utilizing the device cloud’s unique feature.
• It is compatible with over 3200 browsers and physical devices.
• Visual testing, real-time device testing, performance testing, headless testing, and codeless automation are all supported.
• Display Resolution Testing, there are screen resolutions ranging from 800 X 600 to 2560 X 1440.
• Support is provided by Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, and Playwright.
• Geolocation testing entails testing your website from various locations.
• Connect to Jenkins, Bamboo, Jira, Azure DevOps, and other tools.

Cost of TestComplete: 

A subscription fee after the free trial can be added

2. LambdaTest

LambdaTest is a cloud-based platform for testing the cross-browser compatibility of your web app or website. You can automate Selenium scripts and successfully run them on LambdaTest’s scalable cloud grid or perform live interactive testing in real browser settings.

Key Features of LambdaTest:

• Developer tools are integrated to aid in the debugging of errors encountered during live testing.
• You can avoid post-deployment issues with your website or web application with locally hosted web testing.
• Test from various locations to ensure that your users have a consistent experience across all locales.
• Browser compatibility testing is available online.
• Automated Screenshots / Screenshot Testing is now faster.
• Examine the responsiveness on all screen sizes.
• Collaboration and testing are seamless.
• Locally Hosted Pages are being tested.

Cost of LambdaTest:

• There is a trial version available.
• An annual plan costs $15 per month, while a monthly plan costs $19.

3. Cross-Browser Testing

Cross-browser testing lets you test your website on over 2000 desktop and mobile browsers.

Use Selenium, Appium, or your favorite frameworks to test and debug on live remote devices interactively, view your website in multiple browsers simultaneously, or run automated tests using Selenium, Appium, or your favorite frameworks.

Team or organization following an agile approach. Agile teams can test more quickly thanks to parallel testing and integrations with continuous integration solutions such as Jenkins.

Key Features of Cross-Browser Testing: 

• The Selenium and Appium cloud testing grid enables the engineering team to scale at the promised automation rate.
• It integrates seamlessly into your CI workflow thanks to integrations with great technologies such as Jenkins.
• FireBug, Chrome Dev Tools, and other useful developer tools and extensions are included.
• REST API allows you to use your command line to access almost all of the features of this tool.
• Using Record and Replay, you can create automated tests with no code.
• Create and run Selenium tests in the programming languages of your choice.
• Create full-page screenshots for different browsers and devices.
• Integrate apps into Cross BrowserTesting.com to receive notifications automatically and manually share test results. It is compatible with Slack, Jira, and HipChat.

Cost of Cross-Browser Testing: 

• A free trial is available, with packages beginning at $29 per month.

4. SeleniumBox

Selenium Box is an Enterprise Selenium Grid that primarily serves as a cross-browser and mobile testing infrastructure for significant enterprises, financial institutions, and security-conscious organizations.

Key Features of SeleniumBox:

• It runs on-premises or in your private cloud. It is a low-maintenance solution. Selenium Box will manage Selenium updates, browsers, and drivers.
• It supports the most recent and all previous versions of browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, and macOS Safari.
• Desktop browsers, mobile emulators, and accurate mobile devices are all supported.
• It is installed on your servers or in your private cloud behind your firewall. There is no need for tunnels or other external access.
• Supports Desktop browsers, emulators/simulators, and real-world devices
• Security does not necessitate the use of tunnels or external access.
• Completely manageable and low-maintenance

Cost of SeleniumBox:

A subscription fee can be added once the trial is done

5. Browser Shots

Browser Shots takes screenshots of your website design in various operating systems and browsers. It is a free, open-source online web application that allows developers to test their website’s browser compatibility in one place. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue.

Your website will be displayed in the browsers of several distributed machines. They will take screenshots and upload them to our central dedicated server for you to review.

Key Features of Browser Shots:

• A website UI can be tested using any browser and operating system.
• Check for cross-browser compatibility and a wide range of customization options.
• It is compatible with over 200 different browsers.

Cost of Browser Shots:

• This tool is completely free.

Why Choose TestGrid for Cross-Browser Testing?

Simply because you will not be limited to testing websites on different browsers, but you can also do a ton of more things that can give you an edge over your competitors, and your software testing business will skyrocket.

• Parallel Testing: TestGrid platform enables users to add multiple environments to their testing suite and run parallel testing seamlessly, saving time, effort, and money.

• Supports Continuous Integration: TestGrid provides simple integrations with all popular CI/CD tools to facilitate continuous integration.

• Robust Reporting Capabilities: The TestGrid platform includes powerful test analytics and reporting that can be customized to meet the user’s needs.

• Scalability: With TestGrid, you don’t have to worry about scaling up or down your testing infrastructure based on your testing requirements. Furthermore, as soon as a new version of a browser or operating system (OS) is released to the market, we add it to the available test environments.

• Simple to Code: As we allow users to write automation scripts in a simple English keyword-driven manner, you don’t need to be a coding expert. TestGrid has made automation very, very simple, and anyone can do it.

Conclusion

Your job as a developer is to make your website accessible, appealing, and work smoothly on all devices.

You need to ensure that someone using Internet Explorer can access and enjoy a website in the same way that someone using Google Chrome can. In addition, it enhances the user experience.

This means that customers are less likely to encounter bugs and unappealing layout elements, and they are more likely to develop brand loyalty.

Browser testing promotes a positive reputation and has an impact on bottom-line goals when users can easily view content and experience optimized functionality regardless of the device, operating system, or browser they use.

With TestGrid, testing is made easy, and you can automate the whole process and write the instructions without going through a tedious coding process.

…even a person with no coding knowledge can test a website on different browsers (a.k.a. cross-browser testing), and a variety of other sorts of testing can be automated with TestGrid.

TestGrid provides the maximum number of browsers and their version in the industry to get maximum ROI with TestGrid now. It is one of the most affordable testing tools on the market.

We’ve all noticed that some websites don’t display correctly in specific browsers, believing that the website is broken.

However, when you open it in a different browser, the website loads just fine. As a result, this behavior explains how a website works with different browsers.

The information on the website page is interpreted differently by each browser. As a result, some browsers may lack the features your website is attempting to display, causing your website to appear broken in that browser.