Hello all.
Apologies if this is posted in the wrong section.
I need to test an “Unsupported Browser” message, this should show when the Video cant play but I am unsure on how I could test this as all the browsers I have tried the video is working on.
Could anyone shed some light on how to test this please?
Thanks in advance
Sam
Browserstack gives you the option to go back versions of browsers
Have you given that a try?
I have tried Lambdatest which I believe is the same thing.
I went back quite far with browser versions etc but it still worked
Did your team/product owner specify what browsers were to be unsupported?
No they didn’t, I have asked.
Hi @samjackson - if you have tried the browser versions on which the “unsupported browser message”-page should have appeared and it didn’t - then grab the responsible developer and ask him how he did it and if he tested it. And try to review with him the code and ask him questions like on which browser versions or unsupported browsers the message should appear.
Don’t take the “it worked on my machine”. 
And like @melissafisher wrote another suggestion - if you team hasn’t specified on what browsers are supported and which one won’t get supported - ask them to specify it in the team together. Then you have clear measurements to test on.
Keep on and happy testing 
Thank you Alex, I will take this approach
I may well be facing a similar question myself soon. I’ve been doing introductory Javascript training modules to try get my head around the whole browser “thing”. How I’m approaching it.
It may well fall into the “I’m using an embedded browser and I often encounter video playback problems. So if I see a message telling me the blindingly obvious, that’s not going change the world much.”
Once you have identified the unsupported browsers, you can also ask how they are determining what browser is bringing used.
Typically this is via the “user agent”. You can override the user agent string in Chrome to pretend you are using a different browser.
This link might help:
Developers who create Apps that look at the agent string may be wasting their employers time. This ties in with my first approach point.
Sometimes it is valid to check versions. I used to be a capabilities by version kind of person, but have lately switch paradigm to capabilities by discovery. When you look under the hood, you will for example in the video use case find that the video player will raise events back to the caller to progress the video stream data channel. It will also need to control “furniture” such as a the play mark indicator and handle events to reposition the play head. It’s much simpler to write some code and a timer to check if those events are firing and then tell the user, “Sorry, try a different browser!”, than to guess at which browser versions do or don’t play video.
I’m thus asserting that if you as a tester do follow that trail, and your dev team used a solid approach, you wont need to test hundreds of browsers. You will only need to test that the error message itself is appearing in the correct place, language and so on. Paring it down to only test the one thing is admittedly the hardest part.
It’s a fair point, checking the user agent may not be how the detection is done!
As a reference point for what features became avilable in what versions of browsers, if that is needed, you can use “Can I Use”:
This is very often my goto page when looking for inspired ways to break a web app.