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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'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.
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
ievms has automatically handled setting these images up under the cross-platform VirtualBox for years. Nevertheless, you were pointed at outdated tools. You should be looking at modern.ie, where Microsoft offer virtual images for multiple virtualisation systems running on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Doing a decent job of testing for web developers is expensive. Buying a Mac isn't a big deal. second-hand Mac Minis are cheap. It's the mobile devices you need to worry about - and no, something running on your computer is not an adequate substitute.
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
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.
Amateur web development can be done to amateur standards. Taking a few community college courses in design (at which point you get access to all of the equipment too) would be a definite benefit. Either way, the $650 isn't an impulse buy (I hope) but a business investment. If you're looking to be hired by a business, they look at more than your site portfolio, as they're going to want to train you in their own way of doing things. If you're starting your own business, you're going to need to actually start a business with some capital -- and often that stuff can be used as a tax writeoff.
For people who really don't have the ways and means -- start off with a few non-profit sites; they often have access to the tools, and are a great way to build up a portfolio (they show that you've got your heart in the right place too).
Otherwise, this comes down to the same sour grapes people have regarding paying for Adobe CS to break into DTP, paying for your gear to become a hairdresser, mechanic, etc. -- it's how life works, and IT stuff is CHEAP compared to most vocations of comparable pay.
Adobe was providing an excellent service on the cheap; there are alternative services out there that people can use as well, as they pointed out. 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.
That's what makes android QA so damned expensive at our shop. If a client says we want iOS compatibility and Android compatibility we have to specify on the Android that it's the Nexus phone and tablet that we only QA against running latest version of android. If they want QA on Samsung devices, well it's $X,XXX per device and $YYY per OS version per device.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.