Out of the Box, QF-Test supports testing Websites using Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, some others, and even good ol’ Internet Explorer.
But there are a lot of other, lesser known browsers that you may want to test with anyway, such as (takes deep breath)
- the open source Chromium,
- the crypto-enabled Brave
- the privacy-focused Iron,
- the incredibly customizable Vivaldi,
- or the Russian Firefox-offshoot Yandex,
- (phew, did we miss any?).
Luckily, all of the above (and a lot of even smaller browsers) are based on the Chromium engine that is behind Google Chrome.
Because QF-Test understands the CDP protocol for controlling Google Chrome, it can also work with a lot of the browsers above, but we’ll need to trick QF-Test a little for it to agree to run those unsupported browsers.
To run any Chromium-based browser, we need to make QF-Test believe it’s simply running Chrome. This only takes four edits in our « Start web engine » node:
- We keep « chrome » as our « Browser type » of choice to make QF-Test think what we’re doing is business as usual.
- Under « Directory of browser installation », we sneakily insert the path to our Browser, for example « C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application » (or « /Applications/Brave.app » on macOS).
- To tell QF-Test how the .exe file of the Browser is called (Certainly not « GoogleChrome.exe »!), add the following to the « Executable parameters » section:
-Dqftest.web.webdriver.browserFileName=brave.exe(Or whatever your browser of choice is called). This is not necessary on macOS. - To make sure your custom browser does not share any settings or caches with your Google Chrome installation, you should override the profile path with a second parameter:
-Dqftest.web.profilepath=C:\tmp\brave-profile.
QF-Test controlling the officially unsupported Brave browser.
Trick QF-Test into running a Chromium-based browser it does not officially support
Of course, you can still use $(variables) in pretty much any field of the « Start web engine » node. You can easily customize the browser to use and even run the same test suite in a bunch of different browsers using data drivers.
This whole thing was an interesting experiment, but in the end you should keep the following in mind: Because these browsers all use the same Chromium engine under the hood, they will generally perform very similarly. In most cases, you will be fine just sticking to the default « chrome » Browser type for all your Chromium-based-browser-testing needs.
Another clear advantage: If something doesn’t work properly during web testing with one of the officially supported browsers, the QF-Test support team at support@qftest.com will be happy to help.