Giant Geek Blog

Often you find a neeed to keep an old copy of Firefox around for testing or to use a specific plugin (Example: Selenium). In these cases it can often prove problematic to allow the browser to auto-update. Here are some simple steps to prevent this behavior.

Enter “about:config” into the Firefox URL bar, then change the following values. You can click on them to toggle.

app.update.auto = false
app.update.enabled = false


Alternately, on Windows you can edit the config file at: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ .default\prefs.js

REFERENCES:

Browsers tend to evolve quickly, but they often do not offer the same capabilities cross-platform. As a result of this, there are many standard tests available to the developers of browser software to test for compliance with modern web standards.

Before making use of a specific capability in your web application, it’s often best to determine which browsers can support it.

With the recent rapid release cycle (currently every 6 weeks) for Firefox, it’s a good idea for developers and testers to use the upcoming release versions before they are released to the general public.

For Windows users, you can download and install an appropriate version from:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/

On Ubuntu, it’s a little more difficult, but rather straight-forward:

1. Open a new Terminal window
2. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next
3. sudo apt-get update
4. sudo apt-get install firefox

REFERENCES:

That’s all…. Happy Testing!

Testing web applications with various versions of MSIE (Internet Explorer) often proves problematic as it’s generally not possible to have more than one version installed on a single Windows installation. There are various approaches, such as:

• Having an entire test lab with different browser configurations.
• More often, it’s also possible to run a set of virtual machines on a single desktop.
• Another option is to find a package that ‘hacks’ around some of the Windows limitations and installs (at least partially) the browser rendering capabilities.

NOTE: the final method above has some quirks, but you can generally use it for preliminary testing by developers as it’s obviously easier to maintain.

Here are a few common packages that I’m aware of:

• IECollection
• IETester

Happy testing!

Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.

To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun’s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.

Cheers

I’ve got my “Java Yellow Belt”

While this website does not give out official certifications, it’s a decent measure of individuals knowledge and provides a great way to test what you know (and may have forgotten over the years).

http://www.javablackbelt.com/

Cheers!

In my “day job” I do lot’s of code reviews. I’m a big fan of Agile Programming and JUnits, recently I was introduced to the world of code coverage tools available (for free!) to Java developers.

IMHO, here’s the three front-runners.

• EMMA
• ECLEMMA
• Cobertura

Personally I prefer the Eclipse integration provided by ECLEMMA, but I agree that no one tool is ever ‘best’ for all scenarios.

Some background on this topic if you are interested in learning more:

• CodeCoverageTools.com
• Lessons Learned on the road to 100% code coverage
  

Happy coding.