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Automated testing tools and viewport size

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 6, 2020 11:43AM

I never really thought about this before, but automated testing tools that use a headless browser still need to apply viewport dimensions, and this will determine which media queries are and are not applied. This raises the question of what dimensions they are using.

These thoughts were prompted by an issue that SortSite reported, but the Axe browser extension did not. It turns out that the issue occurs at viewport widths below 1300 pixels and that Axe did not find it because I just happened to run the test with a larger window than that. By contrast, SortSite's headless browser always works at 1024x768 pixels, so it found the issue.

In this case I got lucky, but I want a more robust solution. Does anyone know of a tool that can test a whole website (like SortSite does) rather than one page at a time, but it tests at multiple viewport sizes. At the very least the sizes should be selectable and ideally the tool should work out what sizes it needs to test at to cover all the breakpoints?

I suspect that such a tool will be expensive if it exists at all, but significant issues could be missed if a tool doesn't do that.

Regards,
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
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