PDA Browser Spoofing
One effective technique for basic PDA smoke testing is to use browser spoofing, in effect making a desktop browser lie about its identity to the server and thereby requesting a PDA version of a page.
Spoofing Advantages & Disadvantages
Spoofing is useful to look at pages and track basic functionality, but it is not subsitute for device or emulator testing, becaus spoofing will not necessarily render the page as intended for the target device.
On the other hand, spoofing has its advantages:
- Allows a tester to make sure a PDA version of a page is present on a test server (since PDAs can’t usually access the internal network)
- Allows easy screenshot capture (when the problem is not a rendering issue)
- Much faster to go through a set of links
- Can test server scripts rapidly, ensuring that the right versions of pages get shown
How to spoof using Firefox
- Get Mozilla Firefox.
- Firefox can be enhanced by extensions (read more about it). In Firefox, go to this page to install the extension “user agent switcher” – http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragentswitcher/
- (note: the same developer has also created a “Web Developer Extension”, which I highly recommend). Once you restart the browser, user agent switcher is available as a menu item under “tools”.
- You can now add specific user agent strings in the Options. The user agent string is the text that the browser passes to a Web server to identify itself