Free online tools for testing mobile and desktop web applications

Posted: February 7th, 2014 | By Amitay Dobo | Filed under: Development, Technology, Uncategorized | Tags: cheap bastard, front end, testing, web development | No Comments »

So, you’ve written you state of the art web app. You wrote unit tests, functional tests, relied on browser features detection, validated and linted your code and markup, and researched browser compatability carefully.

(First of all, wow, I’m impressed)
But still..

What about the layout? And some obscure html5 APIs you’ve been using? Are you entirely confident it works and renders ok on the chaotic multitude of devices, operating systems and browsers?

Without going through the hassle of setting up browsers and virtual machines, you can check your browser using some online tools. Those tools can help you to:

Test manually as a user your site or application
Run tests in the browser, and look at their reported results manually
Run tests, and report their results to some server (browserscope might help)
Run selenium tests (and javascript test suits) fully automated

Whether you’re just after a tool for manual testing, or a way to run your tests on multiple platforms, the following list of free(ish) tools might help.

browserstack.com

Hey, 39$ Â a month as the minimum cost is not that free! And the 30 minutes free trial is not enough for much too.
But, good guy Microsoft sponsorsÂ 3 months of use free through their modern IE project, for browsers running on windows. It’s the minimum they owe us for Internet Explorer (except IE3…)
Browserstack are arguably the best in manual testing tools, offering great UI, features, and variety of browsers. They also provide automated tests.

Type: Manual, Javascript tests, Selenium test
Desktop platforms: good variety
Mobile: good variety, actual devices
Cost: 3 months free for Windows (through this promotion), Â from 39$)

saucelabs.com

Browserstack’s geekier brother, which targets automated tests using Selenium (where they have a very solid product). Â Their manual testing tools I find not as good compared to browserstack’s, but still ok for desktop testing. And the value is good at 10$ a month, with unlimited manual testing

Type: Automated selenium and javascript, manual
Desktop platforms: good variety
Mobile: a few emulators
Cost: free tier of 30 minutes / month manual, from 10$ with unlimited access + unlimited automated hours.

webpagetest.org

Its intended use is for front end performance testing, but it can be quite a useful free tool for other tests. They provide some analysis of the performance, and advanced tools, such as resource loading time, page loading events timing, some optmization check list and so on. But also the good old screen shot.
They’re a bit messy and look outdated, but offer a pretty unique set of features, and completely free, so worth checking out.

Type: screenshots, performance analysis.
Automated testing: limited, some obscure scripting API
Mobile: actual devices, small variety
Desktop: reasonable variety (only browsers supported by their agent)
Cost: free

keynotedeviceanywhere.com

A mobile testing service by keynote, an application testing and monitoring services company.
They allow you to connect to an actual mobile device, with whatever state the last user left it, and remote control it. That means you can install applications, browsers, whatever. It’s actually kind of interesting in what kind of random state you get the devices you log into.

Type: Manual (full remote control)
Mobile: actual devices, ok variety on free, huge variety on paid subscription
Dektop: none
Cost: free for unlimited number of 10 minutes sessions on a few devices. Various subscription plans (from ~280$ a month)

browsershots.org

A veteran screenshot service. Kind of works. Sometimes. When you subscribe works somewhat better. Doesn’t work with hashtags urls (for client side apps urls).
So, not such a great service, but when it works, you can run a bunch of unit tests or screen caps on some browsers at once.

Type: Screenshots
Mobile: None
Dekstop: Good variety, some really esoteric ones.
Cost: free, up to a daily quota per website. Ridiculous 30$ subscription.