
Browserbite Tests Your Website Across Browsers Using Computer Vision - phreeza
http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/09/20/browserbite-tests-your-website-across-browsers-using-computer-vision
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BenjieGillam
I think they might be suffering heavy load; I don't think waiting an hour is
an acceptable delay for web dev - it would make for a very slow iteration
loop!

    
    
      > There are 68 other webpages queued before this request. 
      > Your request should be completed in about 1 hour.

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wldlyinaccurate
I was expecting there to be an option to upgrade to a paid account and be able
to skip the queue, but it doesn't look like that's the case.

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regandersong
I don't know if they were predicting a HN size load in this stage of their
development. When I interviewed Kaspar for this article he said that they're
looking for funding this fall to help scale, which looks like a good idea. I
found the service interesting though, well worth a bookmark!

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kasparloog
We ARE working on the payment module right now to give paying customers
priority. For now, we just try keep our servers up to handle the load :)

Kaspar from Browserbite

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tedmiston
Kaspar, can you talk more about how a vision algorithm is used? It sounds like
it's more involved than stitching together screenshots of the whole page and
diffing them.

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kasparloog
You can write a whole PhD thesis about it. Basically it is a result of a 2+
year research project how to detect differences that are relevant to people.
In fact the computers find a lot more differences when you compare pixel-by-
pixel. The keywords are machine vision, artificial intelligence, machine
learning.

The hardest part of working out the right balance of what to detect was to
make the algorithm less picky without losing an eye for detail.

We've benchmarked the algorithm against professional layout testers and the
fault detection quality is on the same level with them.

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pault
Will I be able to run the diff against previous versions of the site? This is
a huge pain point for us and I've been looking for a service that will let us
automate testing for CSS breakage on deploys.

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kasparloog
Yes, it is possible! Can you drop me an e-mail (you can find it on our site)
on how do you plan to use the service for this purpose. Skype call could be
best!

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pault
Thanks, I'll follow up when you're not so busy.

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recthing
Worked pretty well for us, already spotted a couple of funny css bugs on our
home page on IE7 (of course)

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jaz
Kaspar, do you have a general idea of what pricing will be when you start
offering paid tests?

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kasparloog
We're planning to have monthly subscription that would include 50-100
comparisons (depending on how many configurations you want to have in the
package) for $99 per month. Priority processing is for all paying customers,
of course.

There's also going to be Enterprise pricing that includes - scripting support,
testing behind firewalls and some other extras.

