Microsoft Launches BrowserSwarm To Help Web Developers Test Their JS Frameworks And Libraries

Microsoft today launched BrowserSwarm, an open-source tool for testing JavaScript frameworks and libraries across devices and browsers. The aim here, Microsoft says, is to help developers “build great, interoperable frameworks.”

Great frameworks, the company rightly notes, are the foundation of the modern web. Testing them, however, is hard and something many developers don’t always have the resources to do.

BrowserSwarm, which Microsoft developed together with appendTo and Sauce Labs, makes testing frameworks and libraries easy. All a developer has to do is point the service at the code’s GitHub repository and the system then uses the popular QUnit JavaScript Unit Testing framework on top of Sauce Labs’ web app cloud testing platform.

Even if you don’t write your own frameworks and libraries, BrowserSwarm allows you to see the test results for many popular ones like Prototype, BackBone.js and Jquery to ensure that your apps will run smoothly across a wide variety of browsers. For developers who upload their own code, BrowserSwarm creates a basic table with pass/fail scored for all the popular browsers, as well as very detailed job reports.

Given that this is an open source project, Microsoft is asking the community to help improve the results by uploading their own projects and test cases. It’s also looking for developers who are interested in connecting BrowserSwarm to other code repositories besides GitHub.