Is cypress support cross browser testing like selenium or are there any limitations

Question

I am wondering is the cypress support many browser types and version to implement cross-browser testing. As they mentioned in their documentation [1] they do support Chrome-family browsers (including Electron) and beta support for Firefox browsers.

But do they support internet explorer, safari, and other versions of chrome and Firefox? If not is there any alternative way to implement such a facility (external plugin or something)? I have tried the Applitools Ultrafast Grid.[2] But their configurations (APPLITOOLS_API_KEY) mentioned only for windows and mac OS. I'm implementing the project at Ubuntu OS.

And also cross-browser tests should run in the headless mode.

[1] https://docs.cypress.io/guides/guides/cross-browser-testing.html#Continuous-Integration-Strategies

[2] https://applitools.com/blog/cypress-cross-browser-testing?utm_referrer=https://www.google.com/

Answer 1

Cypress currently (Q4 2020) not supporting old Edge, IE and Safari.

It officially supports:

• Firefox
• Chrome, new Edge, Electron (browsers run on Chromium)

It does not support:

• Safari and then no support for WebKit browsers (all iOS browsers!)
• old Edge, IE - those browsers will be deprecated soon so now worry https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-explorer-microsoft-edge

To check state of Safari progress see issue: https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/6422

Official documentation regarding browsers: https://docs.cypress.io/guides/guides/launching-browsers.html#Browsers

If you want to stick with JS testing framework and do test for Safari look at:

• Playwright: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright specially with CodeceptJS https://github.com/codeceptjs/CodeceptJS
• WebdriverIO: https://github.com/webdriverio/webdriverio

Answer 2

This is Sophie from Applitools. Applitools Ultrafast grid supports Cypress with Chrome and FireFox on Linux, IE 10, 11 and Edge on Windows and Safari on MacOS (we support 2 versions back for each browser and the latest version). We also support a variety of mobile devices over Chrome emulations.

From our experience here at Applitools, we don't believe the OS is the source of bugs - if you find a bug in one type of OS you will most likely find it in another.

Here you can find more information about our Ultrafast grid.

I hope that helps :)