How to Run Your Tests on Any Browser & Operating System

Intro

In order to test features in a previous version of Chrome, you would need to run a virtual machine (VM) on your computer with a "legit" version of Windows installed on the VM.

Now what about when the other half of your users use Chrome and Safari on macOS, and maybe other operating systems? What if you need to run those tests in parallel and scale up the number of VMs available? Then you're looking at provisioning, running, and maintaining your own farm of machines and standing up something like Selenium Grid to coordinate tests across them.

And all you wanted to do was run your tests on the browsers you cared about... but there's a better solution to all of this.

A Solution

Rather than take on the overhead of a test infrastructure, you can easily outsource things to a third-party cloud provider (a.k.a. Someone Elses Grid). There are a handful of players in this space, but there's one that stands out -- Sauce Labs.

At the heart of Selenium at scale is the use of Selenium Grid. Selenium Grid lets you distribute test execution across several machines and you connect to it with Selenium WebDriver. With Selenium WebDriver you specify the browser type, browser version, and operating system.

This is fundamentally how Sauce Labs works. Behind the curtain they are ultimately running Selenium Grid, and they receive and execute your tests through Selenium WebDriver.

Here is an example.