What advice do you have for me for testing Feature Upvote (a web SaaS) on different OS’s, browsers, and devices?
I’ve heard of BrowserStack, which calls itself a “Cross Browser Testing Tool”. Is this a good approach? Or should I be using VM’s plus actual devices?
Any particular warnings or shortcuts?
(I have an employee who’ll be doing most of the testing for me, if that influences the answer.)
If you need device feature specific testing BrowserStack is a good option.
If you need to test website sizing/responsiveness/layouts you are better off using dev tools for the various browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Explorer) on Mac and IE. You can install a quick virtual machine with Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/) to test in Windows if you run on Mac. Going that route allows you to watch breakpoints and tweak layouts as needed instead of testing only at set sizes (ala BrowserStack)
A little self promotion, you can add PageProofer to help keep track of any bugs and issues you find while testing.
I’ve used MultiBrowser before with great success, although I’ve mostly for testing in different browsers, not mobile devices, even though it offers device emulation.
I generally use autoprefixer to handle vendor prefixing.CSS, and then test in Chrome, FireFox and Safari locally on my Apple devices (iMac, MBP, iPad, iPhones—geez, makes me sound like a crazy fan). For IE/Edge, I run Windows VMs using VirtualBox. Here’s a good one for IE. I used to use BrowserStack, but if you’re not supporting IE 9 or below, things have gotten consistent enough to not really need it.
And if worse comes to worse, I go grab coffee and stop by Best Buy to test on their devices.
For desktop browsers you could also use http://www.browseemall.com if you prefer using a desktop app. (Drop me a PM if you need a licence, I’m the founder 
)
Thanks Daniel - we’ll take a look at it using the trial period.
If you need to test website sizing/responsiveness/layouts you are better off using dev tools for the various browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Explorer) on Mac and IE.
That’s a good point. As it happens, We’re using VMWare extensively for testing with our main product to date (Poker Copilot, a desktop app). It does mean we have this infrastructure in place already for testing across multiple desktop OS’s and browsers.