Considerations for Mobile Web Testing Using Emulator

Applies to TestComplete 15.62, last modified on March 19, 2024

When testing mobile web sites with TestComplete, please keep in mind the following:

  • Some web sites have a mobile version (such as m.example.com) for phones and a regular desktop version (example.com) for tablets. Web sites can also serve different pages or parts of a page to devices with different operating systems - iOS, Android, Windows Phone and so on. You need to take this into account when creating mobile web tests. For example, you may need to create separate tests for the iOS and Android versions of your tested site.

  • The following features are not emulated:

    • Text autosizing on pages without a defined viewport (for example, zooming the content out to 980px like on iPad). This is due to the fact that TestComplete does not support testing of zoomed web pages.

    • Network bandwidth. To simulate a 3G connection, you can use third-party tools such as Charles Proxy, NetLimiter, NetBalancer and others.

    • GPS spoofing. You cannot override coordinates for the HTML navigator.geolocation API in the emulator. Location-aware web sites will use the computer’s current location (if you allowed it).

  • TestComplete opens and tests mobile web sites using Google Chrome in the mobile emulation mode. Even though Chrome has the same engine (WebKit) as most mobile device browsers, web sites may look different in the Chrome mobile emulator and on real mobile devices.

  • If Advanced emulation settings are disabled, TestComplete may not be able to emulate small browser widths. In this case, the browser size is emulated by resizing the Chrome window size (rather than setting the page viewport), and the Chrome window has a minimum width constraint. For example, the iPhone 5S browser width in portrait mode is 320px, but Chrome on Windows XP cannot be resized to less than 337px.

    We recommend that you enable Advanced emulation settings to avoid issues. If, for some reason, you choose not to, refer to the following table for Chrome width constraints. You may need to emulate the landscape mode instead of the portrait mode to avoid these constraints.

    OS Chrome minimum width, px
    Windows 10
    Windows 8.1
    Windows 7 with Aero theme *
    Windows Vista with Aero theme *
    275
    Windows 7 with Classic (Simple) theme
    Windows Vista with Classic (Simple) theme
    357

    * Some virtual machines do not support Windows Aero and can only use the Classic theme.

See also the Common Considerations and Specifics of Web Testing in Google Chrome sections of the Considerations for Web Testing topic for more information.

See Also

Testing Mobile Web Applications Using Emulator
Creating Cross-Browser Mobile Web Tests Using Emulator
Creating Mobile Browser Profiles

Highlight search results