Best Practice for Cross-Platform Browser Testing for Intranet site for small team?

Question

Hi, in my team usually one web developer creates the web app then does some alpha testing himself before passing the fuller testing to the only tester in the company.

So you probably can guess that we don't have a lot of free pcs or resources available so we can't do the wmware or virtual pc thingy :(

So based on the resources on this excellent site, i came across all these:

how-do-you-handle-cross-browser-compatibility-testing

web-site-cross-browser-testing-in-practice

how-do-you-test-layout-design-across-multiple-browsers-oss

how-do-you-test-your-web-ui-to-see-if-it-renders-uniformly-across-different-brows

browsershot

http://seleniumhq.org/

http://litmusapp.com/

Question:

1. What is the best way to test intranet site? as i've realized some sites like browsershot won't work.

2. Is there a way to automate this? I'm currently using LAMP with Axkit. So mostly perl.

3. As majority of our users are FF & IE users, is there any good resource on the most common quirks on difference between this two? [i.e. alt tag not showing for mouse over in ff,etc]

Answer 1

While I'm not a web developer myself, one more resource of interest may be the SQAF web testing, automation, and selenium forums. I personally use TestComplete for all my automation, and it claims to handle web and intranet very well, but then what else is a manufacturer going to say about their product ;)

Answer 2

Yet another option would be BrowserSeal. Since it is an application and not a web service it will work seamlessly on your intranet.

Answer 3

Check out CrossBrowserTesting.com. It allows you to test both the look (ie screenshots) and, more importantly, the functionality of your site. You can configure your firewall to allow testing of internal resources.

Answer 4

Browsera is another alternative to the tools you've mentioned, as well as Superpreview and BrowserLab. Browsera automatically detects potential problems by checking if the browser layouts are consistent across all browsers instead of just returning screenshots. It will also report errors that the Browser reported such as javascript problems.

Quirksmode is an excellent resource for a detailed list and discussion of various browser-quirks, though I will say that it is difficult to know what particular problem you are having because of the complex interactions between elements.