Microsoft Partners with BrowserStack to Offer Free Testing of Edge Browser

For the past few years, Microsoft has been fairly aggressive in expanding its partnerships and embracing the open source and DevOps communities. Microsoft also wants to promote its own web browser, Edge, which doesn’t work very well if sites and apps don’t provide a smooth user experience in the browser. To help developers create better sites and apps in Edge, Microsoft has teamed up with BrowserStack to offer free cloud-based testing of the browser.

Testing is a major element of development. Without effective testing, you’re essentially releasing beta software and forcing your customers to be the guinea pigs in discovering any flaws or issues. But Microsoft is making it easier for developers to test how things behave and execute within the Edge browser, thanks to a new partnership with BrowserStack.

BrowserStack provides live, web-based browser testing with access to all variations of mobile and desktop browsers across all operating systems and platforms. The company claims to offer more than 1,100 desktop browser variants, including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome and Firefox on its cloud-based infrastructure.

BrowserStack is free to open source projects, but commercial use of BrowserStack generally requires a subscription. It offers plans as low as $12.50 per month for freelancers and $2,499 per month or more for larger enterprise teams. However, for the Edge browser, BrowserStack testing is now available for free, thanks to Microsoft.

“Until now, developers who need to test against a specific version of Microsoft Edge have been limited to local virtual machines, or PCs with Windows 10 installed. However, there are many developers that don’t have easy access to Microsoft Edge for testing purposes,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post announcing the partnership.

As a result, developers now can sign in to BrowserStack and test Microsoft Edge for free. Developers can test sites and apps in the cloud-based Edge browser as if it were a locally installed instance, even if they’re working from macOS, Linux or another operating system that doesn’t natively support Edge.

Read the full article on DevOps.com: BrowserStack Offers Free Microsoft Edge Browser Testing.