A Detailed Guide on Browser Emulator Online
As the number of browsers and operating systems increases, it becomes difficult to rely on manual testing to test websites. Also, it can be a slow, time-taking, and complex process to test manually on all browsers.It is nearly impossible to access multiple devices, platforms, browsers, and their different versions. Consequently, developers look for the best method to automate the test process to cover more browsers and platforms in less time and improve website functionality.
Using a browser emulator online, you can imitate multiple browsers and ensure your website functions in those browsers and platforms. Furthermore, you can leverage automated testing and parallel testing with browser & terminal emulators and take your testing to the next level.
So, how do you ensure your website compatibility? When you do not have access to a particular device, you can emulate its behavior inside your browser using the browser emulator online.
This is a complete guide on browser emulators online, where you will get to know everything about them, from their uses to their advantages.
What is Browser Emulator Online?
With technology advancements, the testing process has its fair share of evolution itself. With time, it was challenging to manage the expense of testing on real devices. Thus, when virtual testing devices like Simulators and Emulators came into existence, QA quickly adapted to them and began conducting cross-browser compatibility testing for the software.
LambdaTest provides a browser emulator online that imitates the behavior of native browsers. It is an excellent tool for testing the responsiveness and compatibility of websites across different sets of devices and platforms.
For instance, a Chrome browser emulator would emulate the feel, look, and behavior of a real Chrome browser. Similarly, a Firefox emulator would imitate the Mozilla Firefox browser, and so on.
Moreover, Android emulators that come with Android SDK are used to test websites on various browsers and mobile devices. Similarly, the iOS simulator for Mac OS X comes with Xcode, so you can use it to emulate the iOS device environment.
However, note that certain behavior is impossible to emulate on the browser emulator, such as APIs and CSS support. Thus, to exhibit those behaviors, you need to test your website on real devices.
Browser Emulator vs Cloud-Based Emulators
You can use cloud-based emulators if you do not have access to local emulators or real devices.
A browser emulator online is a cloud-based emulator that emulates various browsers on a cloud environment. The biggest advantage of browser emulators online is that you can conduct automation testing across browsers and platforms.
Note: A browser simulator is similar to an emulator, as it lets you run specific programs developed for a different OS. For instance, a Safari simulator lets you run a native Safari, but it is not an actual Apple browser. Thus, a browser emulator or simulator can be used synonymously.
Why Do QAs Use Browser Emulators Online?
A developer or QA engineer’s job doesn’t end with the website development and checking its functionality on popular web browsers.
With mobile devices becoming widely accepted by users, you need to test your web application more extensively across a wide set of browsers and platforms. Therefore, manual testing is no longer an exclusively preferred mode of testing.
Primarily, the function of Browser emulators is for cross-browser testing. It allows Developers and QA teams to test websites across multiple browsers without the need to install a bunch of real browsers.
The browser emulator or a browser simulator software package behaves like a real browser. A browser emulator does not render a web page precisely like the real native browser. Hence, the outcomes from browser emulators are close to real browsers but not replicas.
Since it is not the real browser itself but an emulation, you can encounter glitches, as the real browser is much more complex. Therefore, it is necessary to stick to browser emulators in broad testing, or you can define the benchmarks of website testing beforehand.
If you are clear of your testing benchmarks, you will know when to use the real browser, browser emulators, or a combination of both.
Advantages of Using a Browser Emulator
Reduce Testing Time
With browser testing, you can leverage parallel testing, where you can automatically run multiple test cases on the cloud-based emulator. This will significantly reduce the testing time of web applications across various channels.
Cost-Effective
Although testing on real devices derives accurate results, the cost of purchasing various devices and browsers will significantly increase. However, in the browser emulator online, you can test a website on multiple browsers simultaneously, and its responsiveness is on native, mobile web, and hybrid.
As a result, you can save a great deal of money by testing your website at a reduced cost.
Eliminate Traditional Testing Method Limitations
Testing on real browsers like traditional manners requires access to multiple devices with browsers’ versions. Although, it is an effective testing approach in terms of accuracy. Regardless, it has several demerits as being time-consuming, requiring additional software installation, and increased cost.
Browser emulators are beneficial as they expand the list of browsers for testing web applications and execute results quickly.
Test Web Apps Across Channels
It is a significant advantage of using browser emulators online for testing websites as it facilitates the testing across various devices, operating systems, and browser versions. Moreover, you do not have to install any additional software to enable testing native and hybrid environments.
Debugging Websites
Using browser emulator online tools like LambdaTest, you can quickly identify the issues with your website. Also, these tools enable DevTools in the same environment, so you can take measures to rectify those problems and make your website user-friendly.
Use Cases of Browser Emulator Online
Cross Browser Testing
People use different browsers on various devices to access websites, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. With cross-browser testing, you can ensure your website is compatible with browsers on different operating systems like Android, iOS, and Windows.
Cross-browser testing is an essential part of the testing process, where you can find browser-specific compatibility errors on your websites. You can eliminate those errors and ensure your target audience can utilize every function of your website, despite the type of browser or OS.
With a browser emulator online, you do not have to install different browsers (or multiple versions of a single browser) to check if your website is functioning as intended. Simultaneously, it speeds up the cross-browser testing process with a cloud-based environment to enable testing anytime.
Perform Responsive Testing
Users view and interact with your website on various popular appliances like smartphones, tablets, desktops, laptops, etc. Each device has unique functionality, like a touchpad, folding layouts, sensors, etc. It is necessary to check if your website is compatible with such assistive technologies.
With browser emulators online, you can assess the responsiveness of your website across different devices, viewports, and resolutions. Thus, you can offer a seamless user experience with websites responsive across distinct screen sizes of desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Selenium Automated Testing
Manual testing is prone to human-made errors. Also, based on the website and test cases, it can take several hours or even weeks to complete the testing process. Therefore, manual testers are allotted to uncover the issues in the UI/UX that a user might face while interacting with the website.
However, with automation tools like Selenium, it becomes easy to find bugs, debugging, and error-reporting. Test scripts written on automation tools like Cloud Selenium Grid must run multiple times on different browsers.
You can execute those automation scripts with browser emulators online across multiple desktop and mobile browsers. Simultaneously, you can significantly reduce test cycles via parallel testing.
Testing Locally Hosted Web Pages
Another important requirement for developers is to test a website locally to determine its efficiency while it is under development. Specifically, it is a way to test local websites on mobile devices and desktops to ensure it runs as intended when publicly accessible.
Testing local websites will check and confirm your website’s functionality in real user conditions before making it live. With Browser Emulator Online, you can test local site versions on cloud browser emulators for multiple browsers across operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android.
Test Web Application on Multiple Browsers
Since users use multiple browsers to visit a web app, cross-browser incompatibilities are very common. Each browser renders web application code differently. Thus, the code of certain functionality executing smoothly for a specific browser may display issues on other browsers, resulting in frustration for users and reducing conversions.
Therefore, it becomes the developer's responsibility to ensure the web application code is accepted by different browsers and runs smoothly. With browser emulators online, you can locate browser-specific compatibility errors in thousands of the latest browsers, like Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Opera, etc., in a cloud environment and debug them.
Find Bugs or Errors on Web Pages
After finding the bugs on the website causing compatibility issues in the browsers, it is necessary to troubleshoot those errors and ensure a seamless user interface. However, locating errors and managing the debugging process in a separate environment can be tedious.
There are browser emulators online with in-built developer tools to access the browser planned to test and the DevTools. Here, you can manage all types of logs to debug any UI error in real time on an online web browser emulator.
Conclusion
If you are a website developer or QA tester, it is necessary to test your website across multiple popular browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge. However, your user base changes based on various devices, browser versions, or platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows.
Therefore, testing your website across all the combinations of browsers, OS, and devices on physical hardware is overwhelming. At the same time, it is a time-taking process and increases the cost of purchasing all the software.
Hence, browser emulator tools are always an effective medium to test web applications across an array of devices, OS, and browsers.
However, it is essential to be clear about the scope of testing to know your customer needs to serve them with the best user interface.