Nowadays, we have to test our application in a lot of browsers, but how ?
Cross-browser testing is chose to guarantee that a website or web application works on different browsers and it involves compatibility check and testing of both client-side apps.
According to the statistics from W3Schools, Chrome is one of the most popular browsers these days with 54.1% market share followed by Firefox with 27.2% market share. On the other hand Internet explorer is at third place with 11.7% market share followed by Safari and Opera.
Maybe your website will look very different in all these browsers as each of the browsers will understand some code a little differently than the other one. For this reason, it is important to perform cross-browser testing to ensure your website runs on all the mainly browsers.
Reasons to test your website in other browser:
-Running browser specific tests will spend more time.
-Customers never like to use the same browser.
-Mobile is in demand. Pay attention in mobile browsers.
-New technology is not supported by all browsers.
-You have to worry with the Security too.
-No one likes to maintain separate tests for each and every browser. (Of course, it is boring)
Browser Compatibility?
Check whether the application works the way it should across all the browsers, you should take a look at the following ingredients of a web application or website:
-HTML:
– CSS Styles & CSS Validations:
– Sessions & Cookies:
-JavaScript:
– Text Alignments & Page Layouts:
There are several other important areas of web applications to be considered for achieving 100% cross-browser compatibility such as:
-Font Sizes
-Mouse Hover
-SSL Certificates
-Upload File
-Export File
-Scroll Bar Appearance
-Flash Work
-Page Zoom In/Out
-Pop Ups
-Space between various HTML components, etc.
Functional Testing?
> There are 5 actively used versions of Internet Explorer, 8 versions of Firefox, 7 versions of Chrome, 3 versions of Safari and 3 versions of Opera. That makes a total of 26 versions of browsers on which to test your application.
> Even if you cut down to the main versions of each of the main browsers, you will have to repeat your web application testing at least 9 times.
> You need to test your application on multiple browser versions every time your application has a new release.
> You need to test your application on multiple browser versions every time the browser has a new release. Firefox releases a new version almost every 2 weeks.
> Manual testing on each browser version is time consuming, monotonous and prone to human errors.
Rafaela Azevedo 
Nice Article….
Don’t you think that we need to consider about the Operating systems with the browsers combinationso are required.
Thank you and excellent question !
Yes, there is a slightly difference with the browsers in the different OS too (You can see this because the actual version of Firefox on Windows it is one and on Mac it is another), but if you have to choose only one OS is better to test all browsers in the most used Operating System.