I wanted to ask what other people in the industry are doing with regards mobile browser support and is there any way of being able to understand the breakdown of what actual browsers people are using and not simply their OS, for example I have Safari, Opera, Chrome and Skyfire installed on my iPhone and tend to use Chrome most of the time.
I assume that they will still render differently?
Any help would be appreciated, thanks
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What is the best way to test my website across various mobile browsers AND various versions of each of those browsers.
Additional Info:
Most of the online cross browser testing support wide range of desktop browser testing, and quite a range of mobile devices. But they don't seem to offer various versions of mobile browsers on those devices.
This similar question is quite old and it is surprising that in spite of the proliferation of mobile devices and focus on responsive designs, testing services for mobile is not catching up.
Major mobile browsers I would like to target : various mobile versions of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Dolphin, UC Web etc
Just wanted to note this and this good alternative to online testing services for desktop browsers. Maybe something similar exists for mobile browsers too?
I'll suggest that both Opera's "device mode" is a really good for a first crack. But nothing beats actual device testing. I have found the odd case where Chrome's iPhone mode renders something different than what the actual phone does, but I would say it is about 90%. And the fact that it is so much easier to tweak code, and refresh using Chrome on the desktop rather than tweak, and refresh on phone, that I tolerate the 10% difference as long as I can. Then I just verify on an actual device after I am done with Chome's device mode.
I have not used Opera's device mode, but have heard it is good too.
There is a tool called as https://www.browserling.com/ which can be used for Desktop and Mobile testing(Android)
I don't think there is one way of doing cross browser testing across various mobile browsers and versions. It all boils down to what you want to do?
It is impossible to cover ALL browser combinations and versions. So my suggestion based on experience would be-
If you have too many combinations in mind, use a combinatorial tool (pairwise testing) from here - http://www.pairwise.org/tools.asp and reduce the number of permutations to get the best coverage.
Then go to Android and Apple website to see what the most commonly used phones and versions in the US, Europe and Asia region are based on where your customers are located. They have all these stats publicly available on their website
If you have google analytics see what browsers, versions and phones your users most commonly use to access your website
Now, you will have a list of devices and browser versions which is more focused.
Check what budget you have to invest in cross browser testing. Based on that I would recommend buying at least a couple of phones and tablets based on the usage statistics you got in the first 3 steps. Then, you can choose from a number of cross browser testing tools/services like
BrowserStack
Amazon Devices Farm
Saucelabs
Now atleast you have a more scientific way of doing cross browser testing :-)
I know both use the same webkit version (537.36) and both use the same javascript engine (V8), but are there any other major differences between them?
I have a webapp with automated tests for desktop Chrome but nothing for Chrome on Android. I'm trying to decide if I know it works on desktop Chrome do I need to go through the trouble of testing it on Chrome on Android, or are they similar enough that I should have confidence it works on both.
Thanks!
Main difference is that Android don't have Flash because of the HTML5 implementation, and also there's a lot of different screen sizes and users don't like to zoom in and out a pan and zoom again, so the best you can do is to create a web designed for mobile devices.
On the other hand, if your site is mainly HTML and Javascript, will work 100% on mobile Chrome. I have a HTML5 game and works equal in desktop and mobile.
Also, you can download the Android SDK and test your site in a bunch of different Android versions and screen sizes with the AVD, is like an official Android emulator.
i am currently a mobile web application with jquery mobile. Is there a way of testing the application with an emulator that works for ipad, ios, blackberry, android, symbian and other major os on my local machine without connecting to the internet or using a real phone or hardware.
You may be interested in the ripple project. Currently its a chrome extension for emulating different devices. Sure it has shortcomings but it can be very useful for certain situations.
http://ripple.incubator.apache.org/
To avoid connecting to the internet: run your server on localhost
To avoid using actual hardware, use the emulators that come with the SDKs for the platforms you're interested in. But at first, just use the computer browser; I'd recommend Safari, as it is based on WebKit, like iOS and Android use.
One thing I tend to do is use FireFox with user agent switcher plugin. This allows you to configure a series of user-agent identifiers in your browser to 'fool' your jQuery mobile website into thinking it's dealing with particular devices.
if all you want is to load a mobile url and see how it looks on different phones you could try this site
http://www.synthphone.com/
The Challenge
I would like to create a simple website for:
iPhone 3 and 4
iPad
Android 2.2
– BBerry OS 7 and Playbook Browser
Symbian
Desktop Webbrowser
The Problem
Whats the "best-practice" for detect, optimize and deliver the Webapp for each device/screensitze? I know this is about HTML5, CSS3 Mediaqueries and JS. HTML5 Boilerplate is a good point to start.
But:
Should I detect Browser/Devices via backend/front? What are good
libraries?
How Do I detect different screensizes? What are good libraries?
etc.
Use Phone Gap as your starting point.
Depending on your use case, there may be other libraries you may want to pile on top of it, but basically Phone Gap is what you should start with.
My suggestion would be to use Sencha Touch. Its a very mature mobile app frame work with a very active community. They support any mobile that uses the webkit based browser which is everything on your list(Im not sure about the symbian browser).
Sencha 2 which will be released by the end of october will have its own native packaging library, so the use of phonegap wont be required. But it work well with phone gap if preferred.
Mobl is new language for the mobile web. just a look on it.
Adobe's Edge is the most refined HTML5 creator that also supports Android, iOS and Playbook (IMHO forget about Symbian, that's Nokia's half dead platform). BB7 uses webkit like most other desktop and mobile browsers.
Note that coincidentally Phonegap (that I see in other answers here) is part of Adobe now.
You can give a try to Titanium's new web SDK too.
And then look at this SO question which is very similar to yours and has lots of useful links in it.
I'm working on a javascript framework that generates webkit browser pages which emulate a native app for Android & iPhone.
I'm using an iPhone emulator (iBBPhone -- very nice) to see how my pages would look on the iPhone and iPad. I was curious if there was something besides the Android SDK phone emulator that would simulate the Android browsing experience. I'm using desktop Google Chrome right now as a "pretend Android" browser but I'm not sure how alike they really are.
The Android emulator that ships with the SDK is a bit too slow to fire up on my box to be of great use in what I'm doing (even when starting up a saved image), and I was curious if there was anything else out there that simulates Android browsing. Thanks!
I think this Firefox plugin will let you display the site as it would show up in several different types of browsers. I know it supports iPhone so I imagine it will do Android as well. This page also talks about some other Firefox plug-ins that may be useful to you.
Chrome has a nice add-on named Ripple that does the job nicely I've found. http://ripple.tinyhippos.com/
These guys pretend to meet this need. Might be a good idea to check it out.
http://www.browserstack.com/mobile-browser-emulator