BrowserStack

BrowserStack

Type	Private
Founded	September 2011
No. of locations	Mumbai, India Texas, USA
Area served	Worldwide
Founder(s)	Ritesh Arora Nakul Aggrawal
Industry	Internet
Products	Live Interactive Testing Automate for Selenium and JavaScript Testing
Employees	50+ (June, 2014)
Website	www.browserstack.com
Type of site	Cross-browser testing
Registration	Required to use products
Current status	Active

BrowserStack is a cross-browser testing tool,^[1] to test public websites and protected servers, on a cloud infrastructure of desktop and mobile browsers. Websites can be tested interactively, or through the use of Selenium or JavaScript automated test suites. The features include 700+ real browsers,^[2] Local Testing,^[3] Screenshots,^[4] Responsive,^[5] developer tools, and APIs for integration among others. BrowserStack was founded by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal in April 2011, and launched fully in September 2011. It has gained widespread acceptance in the web development community,^[6] as of August 2014, there are 25,000 customers and 520,000 registered developers in 130+ countries.^[7]

History

BrowserStack was conceptualized by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggrawal in 2011, when they were creating a website for their consultancy services. The website took two days to build, however testing it on different browsers and OSes was tedious and time-consuming.^[8] When they looked for more efficient ways to test their site, there was nothing which provided a comprehensive testing experience, and thus the idea of BrowserStack was born.

BrowserStack was built in a coffee shop, and the company was established in Mumbai, India. Starting with 2 people, BrowserStack moved rapidly to private beta, and opened its public registrations in September 2011. In 6 months time, there were 20,000 registrations, and 1000 paying customers.

BrowserStack started gaining traction with companies, partnering with Microsoft and modern.IE^[9][10] in December 2012. Users from modern.IE get 3 months of free interactive testing on browsers on Windows OSes. By the end of the year, there were 5,500 customers.

In April 2013, Screenshots + Responsive was launched. Screenshots checks website layouts and designs across a wide selection of browsers at once, and Responsive displays websites in devices at actual screen sizes, resolutions and viewports.

Subsequently, in October 2013, Automate was launched for automated browser testing with Selenium and JavaScript. BrowserStack hit a new milestone of 17,000 customers.

BrowserStack has grown to 50 employees in 2 years time, and in June 2014, reached 23,000 customers.

Products

Live

Live is a cross-browser testing tool for websites. The user’s website opens on a remote machine, with a selected browser and OS combination. The remote browsers are preloaded with developer tools, and the user can interact with their website in the same way as they would on their local machine. Live can be used to test public websites, or private and protected servers via the Local Testing feature.

Automate

BrowserStack Automate provides a platform to run automated browser tests using either the Selenium or JavaScript testing framework. Tests can be customized using capabilities, which are a series of key-value pairs used to pass values to the tests. Selenium has a set of default capabilities, whereas BrowserStack has created specific capabilities to increase the customization available to users. In addition, there is support for popular Continuous Integration tools, like Jenkins, Travis and Circle CI. BrowserStack also supports the use of REST API to access information about automated tests, such as status, builds, projects, sessions and browsers. Tests can be run in parallel on BrowserStack infrastructure to cut down on testing time. Like Live, Automate can also be used to test public or private and protected servers, using the Local Testing feature.

Screenshots

Screenshots is used to conduct rapid layout testing of websites. It can instantly generate screenshots of a website across a range of 650+ browsers, by selecting 25 browsers at a time. The screenshots can then be downloaded for comparison and future reference. BrowserStack also provides API access for headless creation of screenshots over a selection of OSes and browsers. Screenshots has two third-party tools: ScreenShooter and Python API wrapper.

Responsive

Responsive is a feature used to test the responsiveness of website layouts and designs. Responsive comes bundled with Screenshots, and it operates in a similar way. It can generate screenshots over a range of screen sizes, where the screen sizes are true to the devices, and have the actual resolutions and viewports set.

BrowserStack provides the following devices in Responsive:

Device	Resolution	Size	Viewport
iPhone 5S	640x1136	4	320x568
Galaxy S5 Mini	720x1280	4.5	360x640
Galaxy S5	1080x1920	5.1	360x640
Note 3	1080x1920	5.7	360x640
iPhone 6	750x1334	4.7	375x667
Nexus 4	738x1280	4.7	384x640
iPhone 6 Plus	1080x1920	5.5	414x736
Kindle Fire HDX 7	1200x1920	7	600x960
iPad Mini 2	1536 x 2048	7.9	768 x 1024
iPad Air	1536x2048	9.7	768 x 1024
Galaxy Tab 2	800x1280	10.1	800x1280
Windows 7	1280x1024	N/A	1280x1024
OS X Yosemite	1920x1080	N/A	1920x1080

Features

BrowserStack has several features which increase the range of testing functionality of websites.

Local Testing

Local Testing is a BrowserStack feature that can be used to test private servers or web design folders on the BrowserStack cloud infrastructure. Local Testing sets up a secure connection^[11] between the user’s local machine and the remote machine, and transfers data through that connection. There are two ways to set up the connection: browser extensions for Chrome^[12] and Firefox,^[13] or using command-line binaries. The browser extensions need to be installed once, and can be used repeatedly after. Similarly, the binaries only need to be downloaded once. Both mechanisms are updated regularly.

Local Testing supports HTTPS, and content served from multiple servers. It is especially useful when testing from machines that are behind firewalls or use VPNs.

Security

The BrowserStack infrastructure is made of virtual machines on remote computers. Each of the remote machines are sourced from reputable hosting providers, who undergo a rigorous vetting process. Once a browser and OS combination is selected by a user, a fresh instance is created on a remote machine and assigned to the user. After the user's testing session completes, the instance is removed and the machine undergoes a thorough teardown process.

To maintain information security, all the data is encrypted before being transferred between the user's machine and BrowserStack. Testing and browsing data is not saved anywhere. In addition, there is a access control system in place, which prevents users from accessing each others' testing sessions.

Real mobile devices

While BrowserStack initially started out with official emulators for iOS and Android mobile devices, there has been a shift toward introducing a real mobile devices cloud. As of August 2014, Automate tests run on real iOS devices. Android will be added soon thereafter, and finally the other products, Live and Screenshots, will receive real mobile device support.

Real browsers

The browsers installed on BrowserStack remote machines are actual versions of the browsers, and not emulators. Therefore testing a website on any of the browsers produces an authentic result, identical to a locally installed browser.

Desktop OSes

BrowserStack supports a comprehensive set of Windows and Mac OSes to test on, with the latest ones added regularly. Apple OS X Yosemite was added in September 2014.

Cloud-based infrastructure

BrowserStack has partnered with hosting providers globally, and the remote machines are hosted on servers in 12 locations. Customers are assigned remote machines for testing based on their geographical location, to reduce network latency.

Developer tools

All the remote browsers come with pre-installed developer tools, like Firebug Lite and IE Developer Toolbar among others.

Issue Tracker

BrowserStack lets you capture bugs while testing sites interactively on Live. The screenshots can be annotated, and shared with Team members.

APIs

BrowserStack supports REST API for the retrieval of Automate test information using the command-line interface. In addition, Screenshots has a dedicated API for creation of screenshots.

Integrations

BrowserStack integrates with a few web development products for easy testing. There are integrations for each product:

Live

• CodePen: Pens, the units of the editor, can be opened up in a combination on BrowserStack through integration.^[14]
• Visual Studio: Available as an extension, the Visual Studio integration appears in the browser list within the application. Clicking on the link opens the selected combination on BrowserStack. The BrowserStack Visual Studio extension is available for download directly through Visual Studio.^[15][16]
• Test IE for Chrome: A Google Chrome extension for testing any website across all versions of IE directly from the browser.^[17]
• Test IE for Firefox: Test IE is a Mozilla Firefox add-on for testing any website across all versions of IE directly from the browser.^[18]
• BrowserStackButton: BrowserStackButton is a button available on a user’s page, which allows one to view the page in BrowserStack. It is currently set up to work on a Rails project but could probably be used in Sinatra or the like.
• Microsoft WebMatrix: BrowserStack is integrated in an extension with Microsoft WebMatrix, in order to test code that is developed within the tool.
• Bookmarklets: A collection of bookmarklets for in-context browser testing developed.

Automate

Automate integrations assist in creating Selenium or JavaScript automated tests, and running them on BrowserStack. There are currently three: XML2Selenium, Automation Samurai and Siesta.

Support for Continuous Integration

Automated test suites can be run directly from a CI tool on BrowserStack infrastructure. There is documentation for integration with Jenkins, Travis and Circle CI on BrowserStack's site.

Testing frameworks

BrowserStack has support for testing frameworks of different programming languages, like Ruby, Python, and Java, among others.

Team management

A single BrowserStack subscription can be used by entire testing teams. The role-based access management setup includes an owner, admins and users. The owner and admins can set user permissions for access to products. In August 2014, the functionality of sub-teams was added as well.

Support for Open Source projects

BrowserStack supports open source development^[19] and innovation in technology in the following ways:

• Free accounts for open source projects.
• Sponsorship of open source projects, like jQuery and the Selenium project.^[20]
• Sponsorship of conferences. Some of the recently sponsored conferences: jQuery 2013, rootconf, SeConf 2014,^[21] and jQuery 2014.^[22]

References