Simulators/emulators for mobile browser testing?I'm doing development of a web application aimed at mobile devices. What software can I use to simulate/emulate mobile browser environments?
I'm specifically looking for a way to test on Mobile Safari, the Android browser, mobile Opera, Mobile IE, the Blackberry Browser and any other common platform I'm missing.
Note: I am using Windows as my development platform, but I am able to use anything that can be installed on an x86 PC for testing.
ACCEPTED]
There is a really good roundup of 38 mobile browser emulators here [1].
Just the names and download links of those emulators:
The URLs of these links have been updated over time, and so have diverged slightly from the linked article.
[1] http://www.mobilexweb.com/emulatorsThe desktop version of Opera [1] has a mode to emulate Opera Mobile. (Or at least it did — I can’t find it in recent Mac versions.)
In Opera 9 on the Mac (not sure where the option is on other versions) you want:
View > Small Screen.
Opera 11 for Windows:
View > Developer Tools > Page Information > View button > Small Screen
Note this does not change the User-Agents header sent by Opera, so sites will probably not detect that you are in “mobile” mode.
And of course it’ll emulate Opera Mobile as it was when that version of full Opera was released, rather than the latest version.
Alternatively, Opera now provides a mobile emulator on the desktop: http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mobile/
[1] http://www.opera.com/There's a free tool (Chrome Extension) called Ripple [1]:
Test and debug your HTML5 mobile applications for multiple platforms. All from within your browser and in a fraction of the time.
UPDATE: It has now evolved into a standalone product, Ripple Emulator for Blackberry WebWorks [2]. It is also open-source now [3].
It has the following emulation options at least:
As a rule of thumb the emulator provided by the device manufacturer, or OS provider, is the closest to real device testing.
You didn't ask about Nokia, but in general these can be found at forum.nokia.com [2], which is where you get Symbian S60 emulators as well.
I haven't looked into Blackberry and Opera yet.
[1] http://code.google.com/androidWe use this one to emulate iPhone and iPad browser on Windows: iBBDemo [1]. It's actually Air-based, so it's cross platform. The tool is free and open-source.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/ibbdemo2/that testiphone.com is a joke. a pathetic joke actually. It just loads any website in a Iframe of the size of a iphone screen! Its just an Iframe! so, if you use IE and open a site and you open the same site on testiphone BUT using firefox this time, the results are, of course, different!
so, of course is going to ignore user agent, or any peculiarity of the iphone browser
You can use Microsoft Device Emulator [1] to run Windows Mobile [2] on your desktop, giving you access to Mobile IE.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A6F6ADAF-12E3-4B2F-A394-356E2C2FB114&displaylang=enif you just want to quickly view how a webpage would render at various mobile device resolutions then synthphone.com is a nice little webpage...
you can even set custom dimensions and link directly to a url via query string params. for example, click the link below which points to the Sencha Touch 2 carousel on a device with width: 444 and height: 333.
(Use your mouse like a finger to slide around the images etc.)
i made it in just a couple hours and use it to demo some sencha touch html5 apps for my ui/ux team.
no authentication required, no account needed, no ads... enjoy!
For BlackBerry you can download a simulator [1] for almost any handset and OS version you'd like. The simulators contain all of the native apps including the browser.
[1] http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/simulators.jspYou can use DeviceAnywhere (http://www.deviceanywhere.com) to test on a TON of mobile phones. Anything from the Moto RAZR to the Palm Pre. It is quite expensive though, but it's worth it if your doing mobile web development for a company who is willing to spend the cash.
Mobile firefox (fennec) has versions for PCs(with Windows/Linux/Mac OS)
http://www.browserstack.com/mobile-browser-emulator is a great way to test on mobile emulators.
The Opera Mobile emulator (Windows/Mac OS X/Linux) can be found on the Opera Developer Tools page [1].
You can use the shortcuts created when installing the emulator or command-line options to change device width/height and input mode (keypad or touch).
Note: Opera Mobile defaults to a page width of 850 pixels (the "viewport" meta tag can override this).
[1] http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/Electric Plum is very good and reasonably priced
For windows developers it allows you to launch from Visual Studio 2012, which is a very useful feature.
I use this alongside IETester to cover all my bases.
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
How about Openwave Simulator [1].
Here is the Simulator ofr iPhone Safari [2].
[1] http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/tools_and_sdk/phone_simulator/index.htmFor the record: -Does not spend your time with the blackberry emulator.While it work but it is a pain in the butt to find the way to connect to Internet. I tried in different rig and does not work. -The iphone emulator runs only on OSX and require XCode. -Iphoney does not use a correct user agent, i.e. is useless for most project.
A cheap way (fast) to do the job is to :
while the render may be is not 100% equal than the browser but is a fast solution.
Excellent ANDROID-Emulator-Suite, loading real virtual machines running Android, perfectly emulating mainstream smartphones (gestures, dimensions etc.):
This is what I use for Windows browser emulators. A little slow, but works great.
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/
We are developing a tool for this that does not required downloading, it is tentatively called imitatr.com [1] happy to take feedback on specific features people would like to see.
[1] http://www.imitatr.comTo emulate Android browser on Mac, i use VirtualBox and add a generic Android virtual disk that you can find on android official website.
It's really faster than Froyo Emulator.
