[p2pu-dev] Fwd: problems with IE

[Nadeem Shabir]

Philipp, Zuzel :

Ensuring any web application works over the myriad of different browsers (
versions ) and os' is hard; and can be a very costly activity.

Most recently I've integrated Sauce Labs into our own continuous integration
environment here at Talis; largely because we no longer wanted the pain of
having to set up either physical or virtual kit to replicate the various OS
and Browser (+ version ) combinations - since you need those environments to
run your automated tests against. Sauce Labs (http://www.saucelabs.com)
provides a cloud based service that manages all of that for you. We still
write all of our browser tests in Selenium; but our CI environment
automatically schedules those tests on every build against every version of
any browser we are interested in.

Our developers all have free accounts with Sauce Labs, and we have a single
paid for account that which is used by the Continuous Integration server.

This goes a long way in helping verify if the application is working across
different browsers and is great for testing for  "functional" issues.

This however does not help with Visual issues. For example you might be able
to get a page to look the way you want in Safari and Firefox and Opera but
for some reason the layout is inevitably screwed in IE. What we've found is
that a purely functional test suite wont automatically spot these issues.

For that we developed a slightly different approach a couple of years ago
based loosely on this:

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2005/03/visual-regression-tests_04.html

Our automated test suite runs against all the browser combinations using
Sauce Lab, but the tests take, and store, screen shots at key points in
every workflow.
We then use a visual diff and set a threshold of btw 2-5%, and flag a
failure if screenshots for the same page across different browsers differed
more than that threshold.
Whilst this is not "perfect" its a close as we've ever come to it, or needed
it to be; and alerts us straight away when we've made what appears to be an
innocuous change but introduces a visual regression.

I wonder if a similar set up might help?


On 3 October 2011 17:07, Philipp Schmidt <philipp at p2pu.org> wrote:

> On 3 October 2011 15:59, zuzel.vp <zuzel.vp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Philipp Schmidt <philipp at p2pu.org>
> wrote:
> >> I thought we support IE. From version 6 (or 7?) onwards ... ?
> >>
> >> Is this just a bug maybe - do we test browser support as part of the
> >> development process?
> >
> > http://lists.p2pu.org/pipermail/p2pu-dev/2011-April/000851.html
>
> Quoting your message:
>
> "When I am developing, I visit the site with Firefox (3.6.16 at the
> moment) and with Chrome (10.0.648.205 at the moment) sometimes, so the
> site is more likely to work well with those. Now that we are in beta,
> I think a good policy for browser support could be to allow people to
> report any browser related issues to lighthouse and contributors to
> resolve them. Some IE related issues have being fixes by voluntary
> contributors in the past releases."
>
> It's awesome to see that volunteers are helping fix these issue, but I
> would love to see us do more to make the experience for IE users less
> frustrating:
>
> * Add late versions of IE to the list of supported browsers, and
> include them in release tests
>
> * Let them know that the site doesn't work well in their browser (and
> that we are working to fix it - if it's a supported browser)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> P
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