The Best (and Worst) Browsers to Test With

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Posted August 20, 2013

The Best (and Worst) Browsers to Test With

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We run a lot of on Sauce. And with those tests, we see a lot of failures. Sometimes failures aren ’ t due to bad code, but to the actual browser crashing. Thankfully, when this happens while running a test, we have bill built into our scheme that reboot the browser and rebroadcast your test for you. This happens without you even knowing, and facilitate to create your try life easy.

But we still keep records of every time a browser crashes on our service. We & # x27; ve done this for all the tests ever run on Sauce, which gives us quite a lot of data about browser reliability when it interacts with Selenium. Back in 2011,we took a look at that datato find out which browsers had the highest error rates.

Two years later, with even more information (and more browser versions), we decided to take a look at the information again to find out: Which browser has the eminent error rate?

Error rate by browser

We queried for all tests ever run on Sauce -55 million and enumerate- and looked at the error rate by browser. The results be, well, not surprising.

Yes, it turns out Internet Explorer performs the worst among our users & # x27; tests, with a .25 % mistake rate. But there ’ s more to the whole story hither. This graph shows the error pace of all browser versions group together, but each browser has many different variation with deviate fault rates. So we broke down the relative error rate by browser version.

Error rate by browser version

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Below, you can see the browser versions with the highest error rates that have at least 1,000 tryout run on them in our service.

When we look at error rates by browser version, IE 6 & amp; IE 7 are the clear winners (well - losers), with mistake rate of .31 % and .29 % respectively. Coming in rump IE 6 & amp; 7 is Chrome 5 follow by Firefox 3.5. Only one later version of Chrome version appears in the graph, Chrome 19. Most versions of Chrome have error rate low enough that they didn ’ t show up on the graph. Neither do later variation of Firefox.

But all of the browser are improving with time, so we so resolve to take a look at the erroneousness rate for the latest edition of all the browser that we had datum from at least 1,000 occupation on.

As you can see, for late browser versions, Safari 6 has the highest error pace in our service at .12 %, which is less than half of IE 6 ’ s .31 % erroneousness pace. Chrome 27 and Firefox 22 hold virtually nonexistent error rates, with IE and Opera falling in the middle.

Opera has a surprisingly eminent error pace compared with other recent browser versions. And while Safari 5 has a .16 % error pace, Safari 6 has fallen to a .12 % fault rate, which overall isn ’ t horrible.

Half of the browser versions we examine had error rates low than .07 %. That ’ s pretty low, and suggests that browser are getting more reliable as more versions get out.

IE - Getting Better All the Time

Finally, we looked at a graph of error rate of different versions of Internet Explorer, and found an interesting trend.

Error rates for IE get be getting significantly low-toned with each new version. Microsoft has been so good at squashing their historically high fault rate that IE 10 has an telling 0.05 % error pace.

Microsoft has really been pushing their new version of Internet Explorer as the nearly modern and high-performing version of IE. You ’ ve may have seen their nostalgia-tingedIE 10 commercial. The data we feature on browser error rates suggests that their claim may have rather a bit of merit.

Though browser usage parcel is an imperfect science, indicator would advise that Chrome is giving IE a run for its money. But will Internet Explorer ’ s alteration and improved execution yield them what it takes to climb back to the top? Guess we ’ ll get to wait and find out. & quot;

Published:
Aug 20, 2013
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