Saturday, December 12, 2015

The best way to test website compatibility issues

Hi All,

I had a chance to attend one of the New York city JavaScript events (JS Open NYC) that was hosted at Microsoft NYC office. I had the opportunity to talk and chat with dozens of open source front end developers about web compatibility and interoperability in modern web design and development.

While i was talking with the event attendees, I introduced new scanning tools that every PM, BA or front end engineer could use to test website compatibility issues.

Microsoft developed tools to scan and test your website for free, below is the website to check all the available tools.

Microsoft Edge Dev Center homepage:  
https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/

In this website, you have four tools to use. I will go through each one of them in this blog post.

1) Quick Scan tool: (my favorite one for technical analysis)
The best tool to do quick scan to your website, it points out all out of date libraries, layouts and things to change in your website to be compatible with most of modern browsers.

Url: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/staticscan/ 

This tool is open source, here is the source code repo in GitHub:
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/static-code-scan


2) Browser Screenshots tool: (my favorite one for UX)
This tool shows you how your website looks like in all browser! very handy and useful.

Url: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/screenshots/ 

3) Virtual Machine (VM):
You can download various VMs that have all IE version with different OS options including Linux and Mac. This is a useful tool for internal and intranet sites.

Url: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/

4) Remote App:
A way to test your site using Remote App session on any OS you use.

Url: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/remote/


I also had a discussion about Chakra (The Core Engine for MS Edge). Since Microsoft announce that the core Edge engine is open source (ChakraCore) and it will be available in GitHub on Jan 2016. Check out the official announcement from Microsoft Edge Dev Team:

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/12/05/open-source-chakra-core/


Hope this helps!


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