Despite the evolution of web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and now Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer is still indispensable for many organizations in industries where older systems are required.
Internet Explorer is not easy to test due to its old architecture, non-compliance with modern web standards, and lack of community support from the development groups.
However, to the organization still using legacy applications, the bottom line is that their web applications work correctly on the old Internet Explorer.
In this article, we will focus on best practices for automating Internet Explorer online with modern tools and technologies. First, however, we will also touch on some of the main challenges related to IE automation and solutions to work around these.
Why Automate Internet Explorer Testing?
But before diving into best practices, know why you still have to automate Internet Explorer testing:
- Legacy Applications: Most of the legacy web applications used by businesses are optimized for Internet Explorer and are being used by finance, health care, and government organizations. These applications need to be updated and tested periodically to ensure that they keep working with Internet Explorer.
- Security and Compliance: If your organization has to obey specific regulations or standards, then applications have to run securely on IE.
- Browser-Specific Bugs: Internet Explorer doesn’t support the same web standards as other modern browsers, and your web application could hit some browser-specific bugs or rendering issues that need to be addressed during testing.
Because the nature of IE testing is very specific, automation can help reduce manual effort, increase accuracy, and make it constant with testing.
Challenges of Automating Internet Explorer Testing
IE testing is more complicated than other types of automation. In fact, it involves several obstacles that have made it a highly complicated process for a modern browser. Some of the common challenges include:
- Slow Execution Time: Internet Explorer executes quite slower compared to modern browsers like Chrome or Edge.
- DevTools and Debugging Features: IE lacks advanced developer tools, which makes debugging and troubleshooting somewhat burdensome.
- Non-Standard Behavior: IE behaves much unlike most modern web standards, sometimes resulting in what might seem like unprovoked behaviors such as premature failure in CSS or JavaScript.
- Technically Outdated Architecture: There isn’t an IE anymore, and not that one needs it; however when issues occur while automating, resources and community to find help are exponentially more difficult.
Internet Explorer Best Practices for Automation
1. Choose Your Right Tools
The very first and most important step to automate testing for Internet Explorer is the identification of the right choice of tools that support Internet Explorer. Here are some current tools you may make use of:
Selenium WebDriver with IEDriverServer
The most widely used tool in automating a web browser is Selenium WebDriver, and it supports Internet Explorer using IEDriverServer. This driver enables the WebDriver to work on Internet Explorer for testing purposes.
- Compatibility: Selenium WebDriver is quite compatible with Internet Explorer and it supports interactions such as filling up the forms, clicking, and moving around web pages.
- IEDriverServer: The latest version of IEDriverServer should be used because any older versions may fail to support the new feature or fixes.
Windows and IE-specific Settings: IE is behaving differently than other browsers on Windows. Thus, for the sake of specificity, make sure to set up IE-specific settings-these would include disabling protected mode and ensuring your zoom levels in your browser are at 100%.
Use LambdaTest for Cross Browser Testing
LambdaTest is an AI-based test execution platform that allows you to run tests across various versions of Internet Explorer, in addition to other versions of browsers, without having to set up the infrastructure locally.
It gives you a scalable infrastructure where you can execute all your Selenium tests on real IE browsers and Microsoft Edge online.
- Multi-version: With LambdaTest, you have the capability of running a test on more than a single version of Internet Explorer, say version 8, 9, 10, and 11.
- Parallel Testing: IE test execution time is reduced by running several tests simultaneously.
- Real Browser Environment: LambdaTest executes the test on real IE browsers instead of emulators, thus ensuring correct results.
2. Run Internet Explorer with Specific Test Suites
The most important reason to define test suites specifically for IE while automating the IE tests is that modern browsers really behave very differently from IE. Some tests, which are passed on Chrome or Firefox, would fail on IE. Isolate IE-specific test cases.
- Separate Test Suites: Do not run the same test suite across all browsers. Instead, create your separate test suites for specific scenarios that are known to behave differently in IE.
- Browser-Specific Tests: Use test framework-level browser detection. You will need to identify that IE tests run without errors. For example you can identify that the client is using which browser in Selenium by using the capability class and also implement logic to cater for scenarios that relate to the IE.
3. Test Optimization with Internet Explorer
Generally, Internet Explorer runs slower in executing automated tests, and the fine-tuning of your test scripts optimizes the speed of execution in several ways. Here are a few strategies to optimize your test scripts for IE:
- Minimize DOM Interactions: IE fails with complex and large DOM structures. Simplify your interactions with the DOM by minimizing unnecessary clicks, scrolls, and element lookups.
- Reduce Unnecessarily High Execution of JavaScript: Since IE doesn’t handle JavaScript as smoothly as other fresh browsers do, avoid highly JavaScript-intensive tests. Test the JavaScript functionality on more powerful browsers as much as possible.
- Native Events: Since native events are on in Selenium WebDriver, IE automation might have better interaction with the browser since it uses real user action simulations.
4. Dealing with Specific Issues in IE Automation
Automated tests on Internet Explorer might produce various unpredictable browser-specific problems, shown below with a few best practices against them:
- CSS Compatibility: Due to the unavailability of support in some of the CSS properties, the visual component might fail in some of the tests. Recommend CSS fallbacks and conditional comments for the changes between IE and other modern browsers.
- JavaScript Errors: Always ensure that you note any IE JavaScript errors that would otherwise not be raised in other browsers. The support of functionality for modern Javascript functions, like fetch or Promise, can be achieved through the use of polyfills on IE.
- Alert and Popup Handling: Alert and popup handling using Internet Explorer might not work the same as it would with other browsers. Selenium WebDriver provides an Alert interface that one can use to automate communication with alerts and pop-ups.
5. Setting up a Stable Test Environment for Internet Explorer
You should ensure a stable testing environment for your IE tests. To do that:
Disable Protected Mode
IE’s Protected Mode prevents WebDriver from accessing the browser.
Go into Internet Options > Security tab > adjust the security settings according to your will so that all zones (Internet, Local intranet, Trusted sites, and Restricted sites) have either their protected mode enabled or disabled in unison.
Selenium WebDriver needs the browser zoom to be set at 100% for IE to function correctly.
So, ensure you set this setting up correctly in your testing environment.
Compatibility View Settings.
IE’s Compatibility View can display your application like it’s an older version of IE. Ensure that this is disabled unless you’re testing specifically for older versions of IE.
Head over to Internet Options > Compatibility View Settings, and clear the “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” checkbox.
6. Headless Mode Alternatives
IE does not natively support headless mode, but you could utilize cloud-based testing environments such as LambdaTest to test on virtual machines, effectively creating a headless testing scenario.
It is viable in the CI/CD pipeline when a full GUI is not a hard requirement for running automated tests.
7. Integrate IE Testing into Your CI/CD Pipeline
The only way in which you can ensure that problems are identified earlier in your development cycle is by automating your Internet Explorer tests and getting these to be run as part of your CI/CD pipeline.
This means that Jenkins, GitLab, or Azure DevOps execute IE tests automatically following every commit, as part of scheduled builds, etc.
Parallel Test Execution
Since IE is slow, running tests in parallel would help optimize the time spent on testing. With LambdaTest or Selenium Grid, which are in combination with CI/CD tools, tests can be executed parallelly.
This would mean that many tests can be performed concurrently against different browsers and versions of IE.
Automated Reporting
Provide automated reports in your CI pipeline.
One can use Allure or ExtentReports to get detailed reports so that developers and testers can easily find the failures and troubleshoot the issue in Internet Explorer.
8. Test Responsiveness and UI Elements
IE, unfortunately, has problems with responsive design as the support for CSS media queries and Flexbox is horribly implemented. Automation tests are strongly recommended to ensure that your web application is displayed correctly across various screen resolutions and devices.
- Responsive Test Automation Tools like LambdaTest give you a platform through which you can test how your web application looks and behaves on varied screen sizes by using IE.
- UI Element Consistency: Verify that the UI elements, whether it is buttons, input fields, dropdowns, or all other interactive components, are rendering and rendering correctly in IE.
9. Periodic Updates of Test Scripts
Due to Windows updates or application changes, as have been discussed above, there could be features and behaviors unique to IE. Periodic reviews and updates of test scripts are done so that automation keeps up with the changes and does not cause test flakiness.
- Monitor changes in the CSS and JavaScript: You keep track of the changes over time, which might affect the performance of your web application in Internet Explorer.
- Run tests frequently: Schedule your test runs for IE as part of your test plan, especially before major releases.
Conclusion
It’s indeed very difficult to automate a test for Internet Explorer. But by using Selenium WebDriver and LambdaTest as a more modern tool, you can make sure your web application will not become IE incompatible.
From the issues specific to testing in IE to optimizing the execution of your tests, the best practices provided below will help smoothen out the automation processes that you will be following, hence ensuring that your tests are efficient, scalable, and reliable.
As Internet Explorer is eventually to be phased out, there are bound to be several legacy systems that continue to depend on it, making automation of test cases for Internet Explorer a necessary exercise.
Setting up a stable environment with the use of cloud solutions and adding automation in your CI/CD pipeline is going to ensure a web experience of good quality for users who will continue to use Internet Explorer.
