voxel phones

Devices in Browserstack are as factory defaults, without latest updates

I use Browserstack a lot for testing website in devices, and It’s especially useful as I don’t have a lot of popular devices that I need to test on. iPhone 5, iPhone 6, iPad, iPad air etc.

I noticed a problem a few times now, and it’s mostly the way these iOS devices handle vendor prefixes – or more specifically that they *require* vendor prefixes for things like transform: rotate();

Sometimes, a page might look totally different on Browserstack (which shows the design messing up disastrously) to on iPhones and iPads that I’ve tested on.

It seemed a bit odd to me that the most favoured devices in the world still required vendor prefixes, when Chrome mostly doesn’t need them. I assumed they must have been updated recently surely, and that Browserstack is only showing me the devices at their factory settings. So I asked them to find out.

Are your iOS devices as they are out of the box, or include latest updates? - ‏@browserstack @davidonionball Yes, we provide iOS devices with the OS and browser versions shipped along with it.

So there’s proof. Devices on Browserstack are at their factory settings, which means any updates to the browser (and there might have been loads by now, surely?) won’t show.

This is good and bad, I can see why you’d want to see what your website looks like on a brand new out-of-the-box iPhone, but also, with the amount of browser updates there’s been, that might display totally different to the majority of iPhones.

But, just something to bear in mind.

Update – Browserstack got back to me saying they do provide the latest version of Safari on iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, which is what I’d expect.

browserstack - You are correct. However, we do provide Safari v9 on iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus.

Although still it looks like you can’t test on an older phone that’s upgraded to Safari 9 (assuming that does happen of course?!).