Selenium Testing: What Role Does It Play in Cross-Browser Testing
Published: 2023-02-24 10:31:52

Selenium, used with cross-browser testing, ensures that web applications look and behave consistently regardless of the browser used to access them. Using Selenium, you may develop test scripts in various computer languages, including Java, Python, PHP, etc. You may test your web applications on several browsers, such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera.

What Is Selenium?
The selenium test kit is a cross-browser automated testing tool available as free, open-source software. It can verify that websites and web apps work across various platforms and browsers. Using a single interface and a programming language like C#, Python, Node, or Java, you may develop test scripts using Selenium.

What Is Cross-Browser Testing?
Functional testing techniques like [cross-browser testing](https://www.pcloudy.com/cross-browser-testing/) ensure that websites and online apps work properly on different browsers. By ensuring that a site functions as intended across widely used browsers, cross-browser testing enables more users to access and utilize it regardless of their device, operating system, or resolution. For app development teams to deliver faultless user experiences to their clients through cross-browser compatibility, cross-browser testing is essential.

Why use Selenium for Cross Browser Testing?
To begin with, Selenium is a well-known open-source framework used for automated or cross-browser testing of websites (or web applications). Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, Ruby, and PHP are well-known programming languages for which the Selenium framework offers language bindings.

Through its connection with well-known CI/CD systems like Jenkins, TeamCity, GitLab CI, and others, the powerful test automation framework Selenium not only plays a key role in web automation testing but also aids in expediting the whole app release process. Selenium’s inability to be utilized for desktop application automation is its lone drawback.

Selenium testing tools used the JSON Wire Protocol before Selenium 4 for client-server communication. Although WebDriver W3C protocol is utilized in the Selenium 4 framework, JSON Wire protocol is being phased out. This indicates that when the tests run on the Selenium 4 Grid, they would be more reliable (or less flaky).

The Selenium framework is meant to minimize the effects of updates to browsers on test scenarios. The browser drivers enable interaction with the WebElements on the page that is presented on the browser.

Here’s a brief overview of the reasons to use cross-browser testing:

Seamless User Experience

Although they follow Open Web Standards, browser makers have their interpretations. They have different ways of rendering HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Apple, for instance, employs WebKit, Gecko for Mozilla Firefox, and Blink for Google Chrome, among others.

The website’s source code may need to be thoroughly debugged for your website or web application to function properly across all browsers, browser versions, and operating systems. In a word, this testing ensures that users of your website or web application have a consistent experience across all browsers and operating systems.

Increased Browser Coverage

Cross-browser testing is mostly used to evaluate various combinations of browser versions. Selenium automation tests code in many browsers at once, improving browser coverage. This testing, therefore, enhances user experiences across many web browser iterations.

Shorter Release Cycles

Running test cases on Selenium Grids enables cross-browser Selenium testing to reach its full potential. The Grids, client-server or hub-node systems, enable testers to conduct browser tests concurrently in various OS and browser configurations considerably more quickly.

How to Go About Testing?
Application testing includes cross-browser testing, which requires more effort than standard testing. The cross-browser testing may be performed manually. Manual testing takes time, though. Thus, adding cross-browser testing increases that period. This results from the manual work required to test the application across various operating systems and browsers.

Even if you were to write the necessary code, you would still need to add lines for various combinations of browsers. To establish trust in your test findings, you should install all the browsers and browser drivers to execute the code on various operating systems. In any case, it is a hassle. Cross-browser testing tools like pCloudy, thankfully, make this simple. As a result, this offers a dependable and excellent user experience across all the clients’ devices and browsers.

How to Perform Cross-Browser Testing?
Running the same set of test cases on several browsers many times is the essence of cross-browser testing. The ideal solution for this kind of repetitive activity is automation. As a result, employing tools to do this testing is more efficient in terms of time and money. Let’s now see how it is accomplished using the Selenium test kit.

Step 1: You can automate test cases using Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers if you’re using Selenium Web Driver.

Step 2: You may use Selenium Web Driver with the Testing framework to test cases simultaneously across several browsers on the same computer.

Step 3: After that, you may write the test cases and run the program.

Conclusion
You can test the compatibility of a website across many browsers. One such automated testing tool that accomplishes this is [selenium testing tools](https://www.pcloudy.com/blogs/understanding-selenium-the-automation-testing-tool/). It is the responsibility of the developers to provide a consistently enjoyable end-user experience across a wide range of browsers and devices.

This brings the Selenium article on cross-browser testing to an end. Hopefully, the concepts made perfect sense to you and that it improved your understanding.