When you want to check if your site works fine on covered versions of Internet Explorer, you may need to check it via IE. Because most front-end developer, who are generally responsible of developing viewable part of site by users, uses Firefox or Chrome for base of development and then develop problematic part of it for the different versions of IE. This is called compatibility.
This kind of testing called as compatibility testing or cross-browser testing is very crucial for e-commerce site because it can cause many customers stop buying, stop member record, or any money related big-bang-bug (bbb). Compatibility testing is a kind of non-functional testing which means that they should be run upon the functional testings have been completed. Actually, this means that there is very little time remaining for compatibility testing at most case. To complete this task there are several webs or tools which make some cross browser testing but I have not yet find a successful one. Since the this kind of services simulate the test environment, there is always a doubt if it simulates the testing environment correctly. I may suggest you to create your compatibility environment on a virtual machines then test it manually if you want to be sure.
Recently I have face a feature of Internet Explorer which analyze your site and report it, as it seem, it is very successful. This features developed by SauceLabs. There are three main features:
- Looks if the site has common coding issues
- Takes screenshots of the site across popular devices and browsers
- Looks if the site has code which is not supported by the modern IE
Coding Issues |
Unsupported Coding by IE |
Screenshots |