March 21, 2002
Online cross-platform testing
So cross-platform testing is the bane of all webdesigners’ lives. I was just musing while reading this indispensable article, which advises, regarding browser support for character entities:
“To be sure a particular browser supports the entities (both named and numeric), simply open your browser to this pages and view the charts. If the character you want doesn’t appear in the target browser, it doesn’t work (simple, huh?).”
Pretend-it’s-magic time: Wouldn’t it be great if someone was to set up a website that’ll provide snapshots of a given URL on any browser on any platform?
Picture this: Using an online form, you enter your URL. Then you specify platform (PC, Mac, Unix, WebTV, PDA, etc.), browser, browser version and desired window size. Submit, and after a short wait, the site serves you a PNG snapshot.
Lynxview gives an idea of what I'm on about, but for something like this you don't want an in-browser approximation. You want a genuine pixel-perfect snapshot of a native application.
Setting something like this up would be a formidable task. Firstly, it would depend on running multiple virtual machines on the server, each clean-installed with the appropriate OS and browser. This thorough tutorial describes the general idea, using a Mac running PC virtual machines. VMWare on a PC would give you Windows and Linux; I don’t know whether you could run MacOS on VMWare. There are Mac emulators available, though. There are also WebTV emulators and Palm and other PDA emulators. (A true virtual machine—one that emulates the hardware platform—would always be preferable to an emulator—which only emulates an OS—though. Old browsers can be got from the evolt browser archive, amongst other places.
All these virtual machines, and the programs running on them, would need to be scriptable by the host machine. Simultaneous requests be many users should be possible, treated as separate processes. Difficult? Impossible? I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.
This adds up to an enormous number of possible browser/platform combinations, but a project like this could be built iteratively, starting with the most common configurations.
Needless to say, the host machine would have to be extremely powerful, and if more than a handful of users are to use it simultaneously, a small server farm will probably make more sense.
But I’m sure I speak for all web designers if I say I’d happily pay for a service like this. Heck, my company would pay for it. Any web design company would.
Of course, once standards-compliant web browsers are the norm, all this would be obsolete. But I'd give it, oh, at least another 2 years.
Anybody think there's a chance of someone doing this? Anyone want to give it a try? This idea is so obvious, I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it. What are the main problems?
Comments
Back in the day, Website Garage had a tool like this. You'd choose a platform (Mac/PC), and a browser/version (Netscape/IE), and later in the day they would post screenshots. Then they were acquired by Netscape, and the service was discontinued.
It was very useful, but it took forever for the screenshots to post.
Building a cross-platform testing station really isn't that hard, or expensive. And most of the browser incompatibilities I come across are due to client-side script, where a screen-grab tool wouldn't help.
And for the freelancers out there, renting a PC/Mac at Kinkos for a half-hour should do the trick.
Posted by: Dan Budiac on March 22, 2002 03:14 PMI've often thought about the idea myself. I have a feeling the bandwith and cpu would be to great for a free setup. I'd be willing to pay a small yearly fee though.
Posted by: James Buckley on March 22, 2002 04:21 PMyeah, i did say something like that. about a year ago rory at speedysnail pointed to an outfit trying to supply this as a subscription service. can't find the link for the life of me. good idea, but helps slide the web into being a medium of professionals. i'd much rather any of our wealthy computer companies give back to the web by sponsoring the browser farm. make it open to everyone till we get this dark period behind us.
Posted by: owen briggs on March 22, 2002 06:15 PMhttp://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html is the only attempt I am aware of that tries this.
I too, would gladly subscribe to a service that could deliver reliable screenshots on common platform combos.
Posted by: Donimo on March 24, 2002 05:30 AMThanks for the interesting feedback! (I also posed the question on web-graphics.com) It turns out there are a couple of services like these in existence:
Netmechanic
AnyBrowser
Deja Vu
Of these, Netmechanic’s "Browser Photo" seems most comprehensive, testing a total of 16 different browser/platform combinations, and it claims to provide “Actual Photos, Not An Emulation”. They charge $135/year, or $15 for a one-off test. So I guess the next question is if anyone can offer a testimonial. I might try it sometime just out of curiousity, e.g. on aardvark’s character entity page. If I do I’ll report back here. (All of Anybrowser’s "compatibility" settings displayed the same entities that IE5.5 does.)
I have to admit my skepticism, though. Both Netmechanic and Anybrowser use the hype-ridden, obfuscatory language aimed at inexperienced developers (or their employers), a style familiar from those largely useless search engine-submission services (services both sites also offer). Dejavu seems closest to the style I’d prefer, but I don’t know how accurate its “emulations” are—they are appearing in your existing browser, after all.
Owen speaks for me too when he says this service ought to be sponsored by the browser companies who caused the whole mess. All of them need to offer “test site in previous versions of our product” on their websites. Not even Opera does this.
But anyway, taken with Dan’s point about cross-browser scripting, the moral of the story is simply to set up a good local testing station.
Posted by: francois on March 24, 2002 05:54 PMPerhaps another viable approach would be (and this is way beyond my skills) to develop an app that runs client side to receive requests that are logged at a central site.
The application is dowloaded by those who want to use the system and they agree to allow their own machine to provide a minimum level of requests per day when online.
The central server searches the web for available matching combinations for each request and initiates the snapshot on the volunteer-users machine, returning it, then, directly to the requester.
Juno developed an app to handle processing on users systems and return results to them, but I don't believe they ever got past the stink of trying to sneak it past their unsophisticated client base.
Posted by: Donimo on March 25, 2002 06:44 AMI run a host of different browsers under Mac OS 9.2.
Surely there are willing parties out there that could give up a bit of time each to collaborate by providing cross-platform information.
I am happy to test, at the moment I am begging people to check my work under various flavours of Win.
Happy to help and give feeedback
Posted by: Andrew on August 20, 2002 02:04 AMPost a comment
(HTML is OK. Two linebreaks are converted to a <p>, one linebreak to a <br />. Represent all occurrences of <, >, and & by character or entity references, i.e. <, >, and &.)
Owen Briggs said something similar in June 2000: http://www.thenoodleincident.com/stay_awake/groups/the_web/arrgh.html.
Posted by: Eric Costello on March 22, 2002 01:05 AM