Imagine that you’re trying to access a site that archives every bongo cat meme in existence. Let’s say you’re doing it for the first time from your first ever MacBook Air.
You open Safari, type the URL, press Enter, and wait for it to load. When it does, none of the GIFs are loading. Buttons and text are all over the page. You check your connectivity and reload, just to see the same screen.
In the end, you’ll likely do one of two things–assume that the site has an issue and leave to return later, or assume that the site is broken and leave to find an alternative.
Browser vendors follow Open Web Standards, but they have their own interpretations of it. Since they each render HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in unique ways, thoroughly debugging your website’s source code is not enough to ensure that your website will look and behave as intended on different browsers (or different versions of a single browser).
So it falls to web developers to abstract browser differences. Cross browser testing helps with that by pinpointing browser-specific compatibility errors so you can debug them quickly. It helps ensure that you’re not alienating a significant part of your target audience–simply because your website does not work on their browser-OS.
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