Cross Browser Testing: Winning The Fight With Test Automation

At Mozilla, a lot of work has been done to try to promote best practices around cross browser testing - although many of us are working carefully to ensure cross browser compatibility of our products, plenty of developers don’t test across many browsers outside the top one or two.

A large part of this is education — many devs, particularly those towards the client-side end of the equation, find cross browser tools tricky to set up. Many new devs are learning their trade through courses that only show testing in one browser - hard to believe in 2016 - and don’t learn command line skills, or setting up tools like Selenium, etc.

To this end, Mozilla started a campaign to educate devs, starting with research, the current state of the industry, and business cases for cross browser testing (See https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/make-the-web-work-for-everyone/ ). They they went on to create learning material to fill the gap between fundamental front end skills, and successful cross browser testing, and partnered with Sauce Labs to provide easier access to tools. The learning module can be found here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_testing/Cross_browser_testing

In this talk, Mozilla’s Chris Mills talks about some of this work including:

• The importance of cross browser testing

• Deciding on what to include in the learning module

• What he learned along the way

• What he found easy and difficult as someone coming from the front-end dev world

About Chris

Chris Mills is a senior tech writer at Mozilla where he writes docs and demos about open web apps, and heads up MDN’s Learning Area ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn ). He loves tinkering around with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web technologies, and gives occasional tech talks at conferences and universities. Outside work, he enjoys playing heavy metal drums and drinking good beer. He lives near Manchester, UK, with his good lady and three beautiful children.