Not really relevant anymore, almost everything is chromium nowadays and if you do responsive design in the first place the only thing you gotta test against is Firefox and maybe in some rare cases Safari on a 2 generation old iPad. The rest just works ™
What this meme originally alluded to is the time where it was rather common to check useragent on initial request and serve a completely different site, HTML, CSS, and everything, based on which device you visit from. So you’d have like a site for Chrome, and for Opera, for Firefox, for Edge and every IE, a Mac version, one for iPad, and a separate version for each iPhone model following the everchanging style guides, also a WAP site, a site for playstation, xbox and wii, and also a few Android ones. But the only company I know that still does this is Google, who serves a broken version of it’s search to mobile Firefox users, just because they can.
Try copying an image from image search. On Chrome there’s newer UI where you can long-press an image and save it or copy the url. While on Firefox without addons it opens up a legacy UI that blocks long-presses. You either have to visit the site itself and fish out the image there, or press share, open the link yourself, which opens even older image page, where you can copy the url from “Full-size image” link. Google claims that Firefox lacks some abilities necessary to display Chrome’s UI, but there’s a simple addon called “google search fixer” that just mimics chrome’s user-agent and proves that this is not at all the case.
Or just a service like browserstack, much cheaper and easier than needing 100 devices. Obviously a bit of non-automated real device testing is a good idea too, but most of it should be automated.
That’s if your management wants to invest in a BrowserStack subscription. I work in consulting and the budget the clients want to spend on test automation are zero.
We had issues with browserstack. It would cache apps on android/iOS between machines. My company had to let them know that it was a security risk. Hope they fixed it.
That’s still only testing one browser, unfortunately, and especially for mobile, Firefox is a very small percentage of users
You ideally need to test Chrome, Safari & Firefox as the bare minimum, at least the latest Samsung browser is a good idea too as it’s often based on an old version of chrome. Thankfully IE has dropped off the list for most engineers now.
It allows testing on different screen sizes and orientations that match certain devices (and allows you to input custom sizes). It also gives you the option to set the User Agent string so certain styles that might be programmed into the site will trigger. However, it does not run the code in different engines. It’s still helpful, but will not show all the bugs or performance issues. For example, the way they render SVG images is slightly different. A certain image that loads quickly in chrome could potentially take longer in Firefox.
But to your point, you don’t need all the devices in the above screenshot to do testing. If you really want to do it manually, you can do so with just Firefox, Chrome, and Safari and use their respective emulators to vary the screen size.
Chrome is 63% (+ edge & Samsung as forks, makes it over 70%) of users, Safari is 20%, Firefox is 3%
Most organisations don’t want you ignoring 1 in 5 people, so unfortunately Safari testing (especially with all its shitty bugs) should be second only to Chrome for any professional work.
Also unfortunately Firefox is only 0.5% of mobile traffic, so it’s not representative of real users to only do your mobile viewport testing in that browser.
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