There is a lot of browsers for the web. All browsers have a lot of different and distinctive features. If you are just browsing, it doesn’t matter which browser are you are using. On the other hand, if you are developing an application, you will have to ensure whether the browsers are compatible. Earlier it was extremely tedious to check and compare the features of all the browsers, but fortunately, BrowserScope has launched and it helps in comparing the performance of the different browsers that are currently available and thereby making the life of developers simpler.

Browserscope is a community-driven project for profiling web browsers whose goals include fostering innovation by tracking browser functionality and being a resource for web developers. The most powerful and useful feature of Browserscope is Gathering test results from users “in the wild”. There is a plethora of aspects of browser that are weighed up with the help of main 4 tests. They are “Network”, “Acid3”, “Selectors API” and “Rich Text”. We can go through a brief overview about the various tests and about what features are they comparing.

Network tests include a lot of tests. There are tests to measure maximum connections for a single host name and to measure the maximum number of connections a browser will open in total across all host names. While the | | Scripts test determines whether scripts can be downloaded in parallel with other resources in the page, || CSS determines whether style sheets can be downloaded in parallel with other resources in the page. There are tests even to testing the browser’s memory cache by determining whether a resource with a future expiration date is correctly read from the browser’s cache. Whereas the Cache Resource Redirects test measures redirect caching for resources in the page, Cache Redirects test measures redirect caching for the main page. It measures if a redirect for the page is cached when it has a future expiration date. Link Prefetch test helps in determining if the prefetch keyword for the link tag works.

Acid3 is a test of dynamic browser capabilities which encourages browser vendors to focus on interoperability that is to ensure proper support for web standards in their products. Acid3 is primarily testing specifications for “Web 2.0” dynamic Web applications. Also, there are some visual-rendering tests which includes web fonts.

Selectors API Testsis a test suite for the W3C CSS Selectors API. Rich text tests cover browsers’ implementations of content editable for basic, rich text formatting commands. Rich text has 4 main tests. Of which Apply Formatting tests use the exec command to apply formatting to ordinary text by running the exec command and checking if any HTML is generated around the selected text. Un-Apply-Formatting tests put different combinations of HTML into a content editable iframe, and then run an exec command to remove the formatting the HTML applies. Change Existing Formatting tests are similar to the unapply tests, except that they are for exec commands which take an argument (font name, font size, etc.). Query Formatting State and Value tests helps to run queryCommandState (for exec commands with no argument) and queryCommandValue (for exec commands with an argument) on HTML with various types of formatting.