Hello everyone,
Is there any free firefox browser simulator available online? I have to do the cross browser testing but my company does not support the installation of firefox because of some internal issues.
Does anyone of you know anything about this or have a hack about how i can achieve this ?
Regards,
If you have the ability to create a virtual machine - create a linux VM and use firefox there,
however if your company are serious about cross browser testing you will also need access to a Mac for Safari
My other suggestion of course is to push back and demand access to the tools required to perform the tasks you have been assigned. They are not free but there are cloud services available intended for exactly your use case.
Its worth pointing out that the time you will spend trying to work around it will almost certainly be more expensive than paying for the tools you need. The cost argument is usually the best in my experience…
Normally, I will play Devils advocate here. I can almost see myself getting into a pointless argument with a pure vegan, but there is a better way. I would go with @alexanderontest , and push back gently.
Work out what a browser’shack (other providers do exist) subscription would cost in terms of budget, and work out how much extra work it would be to extend your test stack to port at least some of your tests to be compatible with a cloud test platform. Take the amount of time that work would take to management. As for your original question, it’s not really what you are wanting I hope. A simulator would just create another business risk, and there is no guarantee at all when you use a 3rd party “simulator”. Back up your cost analysis with data and metrics from browser analytics to show how many people use which browser to access the product. Your web hosting team will love you for asking for real useful data. If the company have a beef with the Mozilla Foundation, you are getting into argument territory, and you may want to also look at testing other browsers as well as mobile phone browsers. Alex mentions Safari, a user base who typically have more discretionary cash, so it needs some cover too. However I would rather test on mobile browsers if they won’t let me test on FireFox. (Mobiles are more fun than MacOS, trust me.) There might be business lost due to a lack of good mobile access. But get your web team to back up things with real current data for your own website.
(I’ve merely repeated what Alex said, but just more shouty. I almost knew this would happen. But please use our gentle advice as currency to fight your corner.)
Hi. Thanks @alexanderontest and @conrad.connected . Yesterday i did the research on cost. Actually the project i am testing is not big enough and cost of purchasing seems higher that that. Having said that I really have to work on my speaking skills along with huge number of arguments to prove them … “Purchasing is the only way”.
Anyway the best thing i could do was to give them the option to allow me to install or just let this browser go away as i cannot develop my own Firefox like browser.
Sweet. Glad you could use our answers as backup. As an engineer getting into political arguments about how it’s OK for customers to use a certain browser but not OK for us in the office to do so is never a good use of our time. I have often had to make similar choices to better support customers by taking on risk or extra work, and that always needs to be an intentional plan.
I’m also looking at cloud-hosted testing, but at the moment it’s still cheaper and I am still happier scaling out my own farm for testing. Mainly because I need a lot of hardware anyway for continuous build and other testing processes, so the build and test hardware already exists for me and those cloud test tools are not yet a good deal for me either.