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Adobe Shuts Down Browser Testing Service BrowserLab
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe has shut down its BrowserLab service, used by many for testing content across multiple desktop platforms. The company pointed its customers to two alternatives: BrowserStack and Sauce Labs. BrowserLab offered cross-browser testing by producing screenshots of websites from various browsers across Windows and OS X platforms. It was very useful for developers looking to support as many different users as possible."
"It was very useful for developers who didn't have computers"
It's possible for a developer to own a computer, singular, but not computers, plural. In order to test on all browsers, one needs a Mac in addition to what already owns, and one needs copies of Windows with each version of Internet Explorer, because Microsoft isn't good at allowing IE versions to sit side-by-side.
That's why they shut it down immediately.
I always used to use http://browsershots.org/ for this kind of testing, no idea what it's like thesedays, though.
So in order to test on every browser without having to own multiple computers, one would have to replace one's current computer with a Mac (to be able to run Safari for Mac) and a retail copy of Windows 8 to install in Boot Camp on the Mac (to run IE 10 and the IE 7-9 virtual machines).
assuming you've got a Mac and licenses for the various Windows distributions you want to test.
My point is that that is a financially expensive assumption: $650 for a Mac mini and about $500 for Windows 8 OEM, Windows 7 retail, and Windows XP retail. Prior to Windows 8, OEM System Builder versions of Windows were not licensed for installation on a computer other than the one they shipped with.
No, it was useful for developers looking to cut corners. Screenshots simply aren't a reliable way of testing something that the user will be interacting with. For instance, one particularly nasty Internet Explorer 6 bug made all the text on a page disappear - but only when the window was resized. There are some Android bugs where the tap target for links is different to where they appear on screen. Some Internet Explorer 8 bugs only manifest themselves while something is being animated.
Aside from the inherent limitations with a screenshot service, I've personally witnessed cases where this tool renders things differently to how a genuine browser renders it. It looks suspiciously like they were using a technique similar to IETester, because they got identical things wrong. A genuine copy of Internet Explorer 6 was rendering something one way, and this tool was showing Internet Explorer rendering something a completely different way.
The only reliable way of testing websites is with virtual machines. It's a little resource intensive, but it guarantees that you are testing with the actual browser and not with some Frankenstein reproduction, and it lets you replicate how a user actually uses the website - which is not by passively looking at it without any interaction.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The Web standards are being followed a lot more closely by browsers. Of course, Microsoft doesn't believe in rounded corners (Anyway, I think that may be patented).
IE7 sucks just about as bad as IE6, but I keep a VM with IE7 (Vista) around for extreme testing.
Most of the issues I encounter these days come from JavaScript/DOM differences, and this service was worthless for that. I need to have VMs on my Mac with multiple versions of browsers. For this kind of testing, Macs are extremely useful, as I can run a full LAMP server on my Air, and run multiple VMs that connect to it as external sites. I can tweak in realtime.
VirtualHostX is also pretty useful, as I can develop sites on my laptop, then directly transition them to the server with no fiddling with mod_rewrite or DB settings.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
With that service you can VNC/Remote Desktop into machines running just about any combination of technology that you want to test again. You can also do screen shots, but being able to click on a screenshot to remote in was always the real perk.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
assuming you're doing professional web development. If you're not, why bother?
Perhaps one is doing amateur web development to build a portfolio to seek a professional web development position. Someone who has yet to move out of his parents' home for the first time or scraping by on unemployment insurance might not be able to afford $650 as an impulse buy.
And, as I pointed out, most people can make do with the equipment they already have, a few free to acquire add-ons, and the same kind of know-how they'd need to produce a modern web site of good quality in the first place.
The problem I'm foreseeing is that one might make a "modern web site of good quality" that works fine in Chrome, Firefox, and IE 10, and not discovering until it's too late that the site breaks in Safari and the employer uses Safari.
So how long until they just admin that everyone should disable their PDF link handler plugins completely and review every PDF document first as an FTP download? Oh and if they're also still including in the recently killed version Dreamweaver tasks, I'm running CS3, and last time I used their browser lab, it was crap. It didn't tell me anything useful at all and every entry was a waste of my time.
Why didn't they offer to sell this part of the company,
ideally as a going concern, on the business market?