The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Michael Krax — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 22:37:00 GMT

Hello,

wow - this is an impressive test matrix and i really do not admire the people running and controlling all those steps. Patience isn't my strong side ;)

Because of my impatience i found a tutorial on how to install multiple IE Version on one Windows XP machine (http://www.quirksmode.org/browsers/multipleie.html). This is a lot faster than running multiple virtual pcs or stuff like that and it works in most cases like a "real" installation (i only test scripting/CSS/rendering though).

Maybe a feature like that could be implemented in IE7. Some kind of "history mode" for developers to easily switch back to ancient versions of IE.

Michael

P.S. quirksmode.org is a great site anyway. For me the #1 ressource for all browser related stuff. Probably tons of valuable infos what needs to be done in IE7 ;)

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Tom — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 08:30:00 GMT

Wait a second — you guys test? Now, that's a shocker.

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Andy Doyle — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 09:37:00 GMT

How do you actually do these tests across multiple configurations?

Are you using a VPC environment or do you have a custom solution that emulates versions of IE on certain Windows releases?

It would be hear more along this line :)

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

John Doe — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 09:19:00 GMT

http://secunia.com/advisories/12321/

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

bob — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 14:48:00 GMT

Firefox has 13 languaages, and 3 platforms. I wonder if they bother testing it for every Windows platform. Probably not.

If they don't, you can't complain though can you? It's free after all, and you should be _grateful_ for that.

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Nala Regeork — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 15:50:00 GMT

Hmm now that we have a fairly functional and non invasive popup blocker (for free)do you think MS could do something about a DHTML show/hide block too. Now, that the popups are blocked the nuisance sites have expanded on this one and it is as potentially as dangerous as a popup?

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Scott — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 17:09:00 GMT

We use a variety of re-imaging systems to test across the multiple configurations, including VPC. I will take that feedback and work to come up with a future post with more details on how we handle the multiple configurations.

Scott
IE Team

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

ShadowChaser — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 20:15:00 GMT

This is completely the wrong place to post this, but I'm going to anyways :-)

Want to see an awesome bug in IE I discovered, to my dismay, a few days ago?

Open IE's FTP client to a site where you have read/write access. Move some files to your desktop, and once you get to about 1%, press Cancel. The copy cancels, but IE will happily delete all of your files!

OUCH, needless to say, it ate about 3 gigs worth of web logs on me - I wisely decided to cancel the move after I noticed the file size and wanted to zip them... But YIKES, talk about data loss.. :P

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Dave — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 11:32:00 GMT

> Firefox has 13 languaages, and 3 platforms. I wonder if they bother testing it for every Windows platform. Probably not.

Becasue Firefox is not so tied to the system that IE is therefore it's likely to work the same on any service pack of a given MS system. Exceptions to this may be big changes like XP SP2 which are like a major upgrade.

Also due to the fact that nightly builds are available and many people download them to test them we can be sure that there's people with all sorts of weird configurations from early versions of Windows 9x up to XP with various levels of patches applied, some people are probably also running it on test builds of Longhorn.

We also have users testing nightly builds in literally hundreds of different Linux configurations, and various releases of MacOS.

Having volunteers to test nightly builds can really help fix bugs that wouldn't be detected otherwise, bugs that may only occur with some obscure hardware installed.

It'd be nice to see nightly builds of IE, it'd certainly keep people interested in the progress being made. In the Firefox world Ben can post on his blog about this cool feature he's just implemented and people can download a test build the next day.

The only problem is the IE install is a bit of a pain, unless you follow the hack that allows multiple versions on the same machine.

Please, make it so we don't need to reboot after installing IE anymore. Make the install as simple as Firefox (you can run an installer, or you can even just unzip a file into any directory)

Note: in Firefox Windows 95 is not supported (just like the IE team have found it too much hassle to support), however the Mozilla suite (at version 1.7.2 at this time) supports Windows 95 still, so Win95 users haven't been totally neglected.

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Ted — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 14:27:00 GMT

IE is a system component, not just a browser. It provides APIs and COM interfaces that are consumed by dozens of applications. Browsers like AOL and Netcaptor, as well as many applications that use the WebBrowser for content rendering.

I'd love to see the application compatibility test list - which apps that rely on IE that Microsoft tests for IE compatibility. I'm sure AOL is top of the list, as well as a bunch of companies that have their lawyers on speed dial the minute they think Microsoft broke their application.

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Ecl — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 11:50:00 GMT

This calls for an immediate redesign, 234+ test environments is asking for trouble. Take your programmers away for 1 week to move code, it will leave you with maybe 10 additonal modules which have to be tailored, the rest can stay the same. You are all too much focussed on the tasks at hand that you forgot the foundation, without a good base to work with it is not worth the effort.

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Daemon — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:59:00 GMT

ASP sucks :/

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

MiiJaySung — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:48:00 GMT

Surely, 200++ test environments is just asking for trouble!

One of the first things any CS student will probably (I say probably as I have yet to go to uni) learn is that coupling classes tightly with other classes is a very bad thing, especially if there is a large number of dependencies. It makes it hard for the class to be updated without breaking code in other classes. This is very basic software engineering knowledge.

This concept also applies to this scaled up scenario. IE is so closely coupled with the base of the OS that is makes it a nightmare to do updates to the codebase.

People have been against IE being tightly bound to the OS since IE4. As the days go by it becomes more obvious why. Now Microsoft are having to pay for their corporate arrogance / stubbornness to listen to others.

I find it very disturbing that IE7 (from what I last read) will only run on Longhorn. This basically says to users that IE7 is highly integrated into the OS.

Why does a browser have to be so tightly integrated? Sure, some apps rely on it's rendering engine, but it doesn't mean a user's computing experience should revolve round one of the troublesome pieces of software known to man.

I understand that current versions of IE aren't suddenly going to decouple from the OS. However doesn't this illustrate why such tight coupling with the OS is so bad.

If IE was not so tightly integrated, it would make it much easier to modify it's codebase, and therefore things like updates and patches could be done it a more response fashion.

Surely things like languages should not be a major issue when it comes to testing. Generally, language specific string can be handled with defined constants or variables, and provided each language constant is defined in the source (and correctly translated) it makes sense, there is no reason why things should screw up.

With well designed code, testing should not be a major issue. With things like unit tests, testing to ensure known bugs don't resurface should be a very straight forward affair. Likewise Continuous integration techniques would allow you to automate testing each time you commit code to the main codebase.

Fair enough I realise this isn't going to change for current versions of IE out there, but hopefully this might be a little push factor when it comes to development of future browsers.

I really do hope that IE does get sorted out fully. There is a long way to go. As a web programmer / designer, I spend a very height percentage of my time trying to fix up designs to make sure they work in IE. I have no problem with getting Safari, Konqueror, or Opera to work. IE's rendering issues are something that need addressing now that you are starting to get on top of security issues. IE has a lot of potential. If IE wasn't left to rot for so long, IE would not have been half as threatened by other browsers. IE is holding back web technology, due to it's poor security and bad standards support. A company like Microsoft should be setting the standards in this area, and certainly not be trying to play catch up with other browsers.

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

MiiJaySung — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:51:00 GMT

Oh, and on a side note. Well dones for getting this page tableless, it loads a lot quicker. It would be nice to see it validate under XHTML 1.x Strict though!

re: The Basics of the IE Testing Matrix

Scott — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 22:46:00 GMT

Shadowchaser -
We have tried to repro the FTP issue you ran into, but are not reproducing the failure.
Do you have more details (exact repro steps, server config, etc)? Can you repro with smaller amounts of data?
Thanks.

Scott
IE Team

IE 8 Beta 2 - More Languages

Hacking for Christ — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:43:52 GMT

3 weeks on, IE 8 Beta 2 is now available in an additional 21 languages, bringing the total to 25. As a comparison, as far as I can tell that's only one fewer than IE 5.5 and 6 were released in, ever. Another sample Microsoft beta, that for Windows Server

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