Testing browser extensions

Question

I\'m going to write bunch of browser extensions (the same functionality for each popular browser). I hope, that some of the code will be shared, but I\'m not sure about this

Answer 1

Testing browser extensions posed some difficulty for me as well, but I've settled on implementing tests in a few different areas that I can invoke simultaneously from browsers driven by Selenium.

The steps I use are:

First, I write test code integrated into the extension code that can be activated by simply going to a specific URL. When the extension sees that URL, it begins running the tests.

Then, in the page that activates the testing in the extension I execute server-side tests to be sure the API performs, and record and log issues there. I record the methods invoked, the time they took, and any errors. So I can see the method the extension invoked, the web performance, the business logic performance, and the database performance.

Lastly, I automatically invoke browsers to point at that specific URL and record their performance along with other test information, errors, etc on any given client system using Selenium:

http://docs.seleniumhq.org/

This way I can break down the tests in terms of browser, extension, server, application, and database and link them all together according to specific test sets. It takes a bit of work to put it all together, but once its done you can have a very nice extension testing framework.

Typically for cross-browser extension development in order to maintain a single code-base I use crossrider, but you can do this with any framework or with native extensions as you wish, Selenium won't care, it is just driving the extension to a particular page and allowing you to interact and perform tests.

One nice thing about this approach is you can use it for live users as well. If you are providing support for your extension, have a user go to your test url and immediately you will see the extension and server-side performance. You won't get the Selenium tests of course, but you will capture a lot of issues this way - very useful when you are coding against a variety of browsers and browser versions.