Cross browser testing with computer vision

How Fortune top 25 companies treat their customers



If you have a fun cross browser testing tool with sharp eyes like Browserbite then it’s fun to give it a run for the money every now and then. We took on the Fortune list and run our set of desktop browsers to see how nicely the pages render.

We expected great results since big companies usually take their corporate web seriously and hire well paid designers and coders to do the job. However, we found some surprises.

In general the pages fared quite well. Most of them had usual issues with differing fonts on Mac OSX/Windows and row spacing issues that caused content to move around more than the web designers originally envisioned.

We used Google Chrome 18 (latest at the moment) as the baseline since this is the most popular browser in our user group. We compared the sites across 13 browsers (to see the full list – test your own webpage above!).

Some of the sites posed difficulties for our tool as well – especially the ones that change their content on every load – our algorithm detects this as a difference, of course. But here come the spotlights – in the wild-wild west style!

The good – Chevron – 100% passed!

From the visual side, Chevron’s website displays practically the same in all browsers that we tested it on. Who says that oil drilling is bad?

See: www.chevron.com/

The bad – Apple – huge bug on Firefox 3.6 – 7.37% market share

Much to our surprise – the vendor of supposedly coolest gadgets on Earth misses out on Windows Vista Firefox 3.6 users. According to StatCounter Firefox is the 5th most popular browser on Earth. Instead of showing the “Resolutionary New iPad” it just gives you a menu with a blank page. One picture is a thousand words. Windows Vista Firefox 3.6 versus Windows 7 Chrome 18.

Our nifty tool shows you how Apple treats 7.37% of their webpage visitors below.

The ugly – Bershire Hathaway

If you want to get a taste of the 90-s then welcome to www.berkshirehathaway.com. Ironically their page renders on every browser with some little quirks everywhere. But at least it works! As an infamous Warren Buffet quote goes: “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

Cross browser testing with computer vision