1

We support IE9, IE10, IE11, Chrome and Firefox, and we support them on Win7, Win8, Win8, and Win10.

If we tested every possible combination of browser and OS that would be 20 times through our script and we're wondering if that is necessary.

I'm fairly confident that the results we get for Chrome or Firefox on one OS will hold for all OS's, but we're not sure if there might be difference in the way certain versions of IE behave on the different OS's.

  1. Am I correct in assuming that Chrome and Firefox will be consistent across OS's?
  2. Will each version of IE be consistent across OS's or do we need to test each possible OS/Browser combo?
  3. Are any differences likely to be functionality differences (piece of javascript fails) or display (css issues)?
Jeremy Hutchinson
  • 328
  • 3
  • 8
  • Yes, I know MS has discountinued support for IE9 and IE10. We literally just discontinued support for IE8 yesterday. – Jeremy Hutchinson Jan 26 '16 at 15:29
  • The amount of testing, in part, depends on how critical an un-caught error would be. Would a failure be catastrophic to someone, or just a nuisance? What percentage of your users are on each platform? Is it worth testing a particular platform if only 1% of your users use that platform? – Bryan Oakley Jan 26 '16 at 20:25
  • We aren't currently tracking browser/OS usage so that analysis is out. The nature of our application is that it is a nuisance if it doesn't work, not catastrophic. But we do want to minimize nuisance. We're just trying to understand if the browsers are generally isolated from the OS enough to just test each browser and not worry about OS versions. Or at least understand how much risk we're exposing ourselves to if we do that. – Jeremy Hutchinson Jan 27 '16 at 18:16

1 Answers1

1

Am I correct in assuming that Chrome and Firefox will be consistent across OS's?

No. Firefox on Windows 10 has some issues with slow network connectivity and Chrome on Windows 10 has some issues with font rendering

Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux use different font and display implementations, so the CSS rendering will never be pixel perfect across operating systems

Will each version of IE be consistent across OS's or do we need to test each possible OS/Browser combo?

No. IE 10 and IE 11 have features which are not part of Windows 7:

Running IE on Windows versus running through an emulator on Mac OSX or Linux will be different due to emulator specific configuration differences

Are any differences likely to be functionality differences (piece of javascript fails) or display (css issues)?

Both. The functionality differences are mostly related to network protocol support and the display differences are related to scaling and zooming behavior based on screen resolution.

References

Paul Sweatte
  • 382
  • 2
  • 15