Quickly and efficiently testing JavaScript across multiple browsers is a necessary but time consuming task. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team in conjunction with appendTo and Sauce Labs has released BrowserSwarm Beta to provide a way for web developers to run their code against a full suite of web browsers. Given the collaborative nature of the project, it also serves as a useful reference site for investigating how a given framework performs and gives smaller teams the ability to easily and regularly test their frameworks without major staff involvement.
BrowserSwarm currently lists results for Internet Explorer, Chrome, FireFox, Opera, and Safari. Some of the existing frameworks established on the service include jQuery, Backbone JS, and Underscore JS. In this initial release of BrowserSwarm, GitHub is the only supported repository at present. When asked, a Microsoft spokesperson indicated that other repositories may be considered in the future. Note that it is not enough for the repository to be publicly accessible, establishing a project to test on BrowserSwarm requires your GitHub username and password. Alternatively manual setup may be used wherein BrowserSwarm provides a webhook and deploy key to be added to the project on GitHub. Either way admin access is required.
When a project is added to BrowserSwarm, the swarm will test the project using Sauce Lab’s cloud-based automated testing platform. For an immediate example of what BrowserSwarm can do, look at these test results from a recent run of Backbone.js.