Unleash the QualityBots
Thursday, October 06, 2011
By Richard Bustamante
Are you a website developer that wants to know if Chrome updates will break your website before they reach the stable release channel? Have you ever wished there was an easy way to compare how your website appears in all channels of Chrome? Now you can!
QualityBots is a new open source tool for web developers created by the Web Testing team at Google. It’s a comparison tool that examines web pages across different Chrome channels using pixel-based DOM analysis. As new versions of Chrome are pushed, QualityBots serves as an early warning system for breakages. Additionally, it helps developers quickly and easily understand how their pages appear across Chrome channels.
QualityBots is built on top of Google AppEngine for the frontend and Amazon EC2 for the backend workers that crawl the web pages. Using QualityBots requires an Amazon EC2 account to run the virtual machines that will crawl public web pages with different versions of Chrome. The tool provides a web frontend where users can log on and request URLs that they want to crawl, see the results from the latest run on a dashboard, and drill down to get detailed information about what elements on the page are causing the trouble.
Developers and testers can use these results to identify sites that need attention due to a high amount of change and to highlight the pages that can be safely ignored when they render identically across Chrome channels. This saves time and the need for tedious compatibility testing of sites when nothing has changed.
We hope that interested website developers will take a deeper look and even join the project at the QualityBots project page. Feedback is more than welcome at qualitybots-discuss@googlegroups.com.
Are you a website developer that wants to know if Chrome updates will break your website before they reach the stable release channel? Have you ever wished there was an easy way to compare how your website appears in all channels of Chrome? Now you can!
QualityBots is a new open source tool for web developers created by the Web Testing team at Google. It’s a comparison tool that examines web pages across different Chrome channels using pixel-based DOM analysis. As new versions of Chrome are pushed, QualityBots serves as an early warning system for breakages. Additionally, it helps developers quickly and easily understand how their pages appear across Chrome channels.
QualityBots is built on top of Google AppEngine for the frontend and Amazon EC2 for the backend workers that crawl the web pages. Using QualityBots requires an Amazon EC2 account to run the virtual machines that will crawl public web pages with different versions of Chrome. The tool provides a web frontend where users can log on and request URLs that they want to crawl, see the results from the latest run on a dashboard, and drill down to get detailed information about what elements on the page are causing the trouble.
Developers and testers can use these results to identify sites that need attention due to a high amount of change and to highlight the pages that can be safely ignored when they render identically across Chrome channels. This saves time and the need for tedious compatibility testing of sites when nothing has changed.
We hope that interested website developers will take a deeper look and even join the project at the QualityBots project page. Feedback is more than welcome at qualitybots-discuss@googlegroups.com.
Hi, thank you for sharing the quality bots with us. i had been waiting for this arrival since the Instant Pages blog post. Do you think this method can be used for firefox as well in the future?
ReplyDeleteCode based is ready for firefox. So with minimal work it can be used for firefox. FYI, Qualitybots is based on webdriver, so whatever webdriver supports QualityBots can support with few server changes.
ReplyDeleteThis blog is very nice and informative!
ReplyDeleteKeep Update....
Thanks for sharing.
you explain a dom and others thing thats your way is nice, one good think way proper worked.
thanks for sharing
offshore software web development
Thanks for posting such a valuable information. In my company, we are trying to test cross browser testing. i would like to know can this tool help in comparing webpages in Internet explorer,Firefox and Chrome.
ReplyDeletePlease reply
Currently this tool only supports comparing pages on different channels of Chrome, cross-browser support is a great application of the technology, but isn't currently implemented and there aren't plans to add it.
ReplyDeleteIf you'd like to add cross-browser support, the code is open sourced and available following the links in the post.