Over the past few years, the dominance of Microsoft Internet Explorer has been eroded by other browsers becoming ‘mainstream’.  The leading challenger is Firefox.  However, web browsers such as Opera, Safari and Chrome are slowly gaining market share, leading to the existence of multiple web browsers as well as multiple versions of those browsers. When you mix in the additional factor of diverse operating systems, the picture becomes even more complex.

According to the site, Market Share, last year alone saw Internet Explorer lose 7% of their market share with the main benefactors being Firefox and Chrome.

This same trend is mirrored by a plethora of existing email clients in webmail and desktop variations, all dealing with HTML in various ways. Again, with desktop clients and web-based e-mail, multiple versions on multiple operating systems are offered.

Fingerprint published the biggest study of email client usage ever conducted, using a sample of almost three million email recipients.  The study identifies the top 10 email clients in use for both consumer and business mailing lists, illustrating the variety of email clients.

Both the continued development of web browsers and email clients make it increasingly difficult for developers trying to create a consistent experience across diverse clients and platforms.  Website developers must test across multiple browsers and email clients incurring significant overhead while diminishing profitability or passing on costs to the client.  Neither option is palatable.

So what is the solution?

There are various ways to test both HTML compliancy with browsers and email clients including the traditional labor-intensive internal testing, which can be costly as a result of requiring multiple machines running various software and email clients, to automated online tools. Virtualization, which allows a single machine to run multiple operating systems and browser versions, is another solution. However, it is still a resource intensive and technically complex system to maintain, requiring testers in your organization to maintain many concurrent versions of operating systems.

The Service

With the exception of the free service Litmus offers, Litmus services allow browser testing over 23 web browsers and email testing over 19 email clients. Once activated, the user uploads HTML or specifies web page location (if testing against browsers) and commences testing.  Litmus takes care of the rest.

The testing results supply a screenshot of html in either browser or email client.   Determination of potential issues is easy. 

Benefits

The Litmus service provides multiple benefits, some which have already been alluded to in this article:

• Speedy testing over multiple browsers/email clients;
• Testing is simple and easy avoiding the need for labor- intensive manual testing;
• No internal overhead for set up and maintenance of  multiple environments;
• Significantly reduced overhead in conducting tests;
• Easy verification of reported bugs for web pages against browser the user runs;
• Detailed screenshots providing how the web page/newsletter renders; and
• Provides insight and aware across multiple platforms of potential issues with any browser/email client.

Whilst Litmus or similar services cannot replace the traditional testing/QA function prior to website release, Litmus offers an efficient method for testing HTML newsletters and individual web pages.

This tool saves countless hours enabling diagnosis of potential issues expeditiously while shortening testing cycles. Not only are testing efforts reduced (and infrastructure costs minimized), Litmus enables staff easy verification of reported issues across browsers without running multiple environments on desktops or requiring access to dedicated testing labs.

Our experience has proven this tool to be an invaluable service as well as a positive ROI for our clients.