Safari Testing: Automating Legacy Browsers With Selenium 

Struggling to implement automated QA testing on legacy browsers? We seriously recommend you to start investing in advanced practices like Selenium testing which will provide various native features and strategies to achieve this goal. Considering the importance of QA for ensuring continuity, compliance, and reliability of your web applications, it is one of the best things that you can do currently. 

Unfamiliar with Selenium testing? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand everything that you need to know about Selenium testing on legacy browsers. We will also help you go through all the challenges and the best resolutions that can help you overcome them. 

Why Automate Legacy Browsers 

Before we straight away jump into Selenium testing for the new testers, we would like to explain why even it is important to invest in automating legacy browsers. To help justify this claim, let us go through some of the major advantages that we have given below: 

• Business Continuity 

There are various mission-critical and government applications that are still running on older browsers like Internet Explorer. The main reason for this reliance is the integration with multiple internal services, plugins, or legacy frameworks. 

So, by including automation testing with this process, you can ensure that the systems continue to function while the entire business slowly moves to modern platforms and other services. 

• Compliance Requirements
   

If you are creating applications within the finance and healthcare industries, you need to implement the regulatory standards to maintain support for specific technologies or browser environments. This support needs to be maintained until recertification is done for newer platforms. This is an area that automation testing can help you achieve. 

• Cost-Effective Testing 

If you are still using manual test cases, there is a high possibility that you are maintaining a huge team of manual testers. On the other hand, if you start transitioning into automation testing practices, you can completely eliminate this team and save a lot of time and resources in your testing environment. 

But, we would like to caution the testers that the initial investment for automation testing is significantly high as you have to invest in multiple tools, frameworks, and plugins that are required for the environment setup process.

Challenges Of Legacy Browser Automation 

Although it is quite a simple and straightforward process to implement the automation testing practices on all modern browsers, the same cannot be said when it comes to legacy browsers. To help you understand further, let us go through some of the major challenges that you will face while trying to automate the test cases for legacy browsers: 

• After the 4th version update of Selenium, it has dropped native support for browsers like Internet Explorer. Therefore implementing rate automation for these browsers will be a very complex process with Selenium. Although you have IEDriver, it also has its own share of limitations. 

• While working with legacy browsers, there’s a huge possibility that they will not support modern JavaScript, HTML5, or CSS3 elements. Therefore, if you have these elements present on your application, there will be major inconsistencies in the rendering of these applications or how the test cases behave when automated. 

• It is common for legacy systems to require outdated plugins like ActiveX Flash or reduced security settings so that they can run properly. However, it will be a very complex to implement this process in a secure or virtualized testing environment. 

• If you want to run legacy browsers on modern operating system platforms, you will require virtualization, compatibility models, or even complete emulation of older environments. However, the process to set up and maintain this entire infrastructure can be complex, especially for new testers. 

Using Selenium For Legacy Browser Testing 

Excited to use Selenium for running automation testing on legacy browsers? The following steps will help you understand how can you set up Selenium to perform. We have given all the steps in the correct order so that you can easily follow them: 

1. The first step will include all the prerequisite softwares and dependencies that you need to install on your testing machine. These will cover the Java JDK, Selenium WebDriver, browser driver, and the Windows machine on which you’ll be running the test cases. 

2. It is worth noting that since we’ll be using the example of Internet Explorer as our legacy browser for these test cases, we will use the reference of InternetExplorerDriver throughout the test execution process. 

3. Now that you have finished installing all the required dependencies, you are ready to write your first automation test script for the testing process. To help you develop a better understanding, we have given a sample code below: 

4. The above code will open a new browser window within the virtual environment, navigate to your target web application within Internet Explorer. Then, it will interact with multiple UI elements and close the browser window to terminate the testing session. Depending on the test results, you will receive a final test report after this process. 

Test Automation Strategy for Legacy Browsers 

Although we have given a detailed flow of using Selenium WebDriver for performing legacy browser testing, we would also like to state the strategies that you need to keep in mind during the test execution process. This approach will help you change or customize the above steps depending on the requirements of your application: 

• It is very important to set up isolated virtual machines on older operating systems and browser versions for running the test cases. We also recommend you to add this entire testing infrastructure with Selenium Grid so that you can run parallel testing for further efficient testing. 

• You must remember that the process of executing automation testing on legacy browsers is very fragile. Therefore, you must concentrate only on the important areas for automation testing, like user authentication, navigation flow, and security workflows. 

• So, what do you do with the other elements of the application? It’s very simple! You have to fall back to manual testing for all the non-automatable elements. You must begin the testing process by first isolating these elements for manual verification and then using hybrid testing frameworks or mock interactions for them. 
   

For example, exploratory testing and visual testing will be the areas that we recommend to perform manually, as there are multiple factors at play which might change the placement of all the UI elements of the application.  

Best Practices for Legacy Browser Test Automation 

Finally, we strongly recommend the testers to incorporate the following best practices within the test environment while implementing test automation on legacy browsers. This is because these approaches will not only help improve the productivity of the testing environment but also add additional advanced scenarios:  

Isolate Tests by Browsers 

While implementing cross-browser testing on a set of multiple legacy browsers, we recommend you to use test annotations or grouping logic. This approach will ensure the legacy browser tests don’t affect the main test suite’s performance, which will consist of multiple modern browsers. 

Want to learn how to implement this process? The following sample code will help you understand this process further: 

Stable Element Locators 

While working with legacy browser pages, you will realize that it will lack unique IDs or will use outdated HTML constructs to find all the elements present on the web application. To deal with this process, we recommend you to use the following native locator strategies that are already present with Selenium testing: 

For example, you can cautiously use XPath or CSS selectors and explicit waits to handle slow page loads. We would also like to mention that explicit waits will also be useful if you’re handling dynamic elements on modern applications. 

Don’t know about dynamic elements? These are those elements that can change their positioning or functioning depending on multiple back end or user parameters. So, the waiting mechanism of Selenium will automatically pause the test execution process until these elements appear and become intractable.  

Use Cloud Testing 

Struggling to test the functioning of our applications on legacy browsers and old devices? We strongly recommend you to start investing in cloud-based testing platforms like LambdaTest. These platforms provide access to a huge device farm consisting of multiple browsers, operating systems, and devices through multiple remote servers. 

To learn more about these platforms, let us use the example of LambdaTest as our reference discussion point: 

LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers, OS combinations, and 10,000+ real devices. This device farm will also be useful for accessing certain incompatible browsers like Safari for Windows. 

Want another good news? LambdaTest will automatically provide you with a detailed test report with multiple screenshots and videos so that you can understand which element of the application is not functioning properly and also implement the required resolution steps.  

Error Handling and Recovery 

While working with legacy testing environments, you will quickly realize that the possibilities of flaky test results like false positives and false negatives is very high. So, we would suggest you to use retry logic, logging, and screenshot capturing to diagnose the issues effectively. 

You can also use the capture screenshots to perform visual testing on the application by comparing the current state of the UI with the captured benchmark screenshot. 

Monitor Performance And Memory leaks 

During the entire test execution process for legacy browsers, you must run frequent audits, which can help you detect memory leaks or performance bottlenecks present within the legacy browser ecosystem. In most cases, these errors will have a very significant role in slowing down the entire continuous integration pipeline.  

The Bottom Line 

Based on all the areas that we have covered in this article, we can easily come to the conclusion that automating legacy browsers may feel like walking on a very dangerous path, but with all the strategies and best practices that we have outlined in this article, you can easily implement this process.  

So, whether you are using Selenium testing for implementing QA or advanced cross-browser test cases, our article will guide you all the way when working with legacy browsers. We also encourage you to maintain the proper balance within test coverage and maintainability to ensure productivity and high quality. 

As a final advice, we also like to ask you to keep yourself updated with all the upcoming trends and innovations in this segment. This approach will ensure that you are providing nothing but the best end-user experience to your customers.