How Device-Browser Fragmentation can affect your Website Business

As the title suggests, this article aims to explain how device-browser fragmentation can affect online businesses. But before getting into the details, let’s answer the most fundamental question.

What is Fragmentation?

Fragmentation refers to the variety of devices, browsers, and platforms in use at any given point in time. For example, a website can be accessed from multiple devices such as mobile, laptops, desktops, or tablets. These devices carry unique screen sizes, operating systems, and browsers.

Why is Fragmentation a problem for online businesses?

The diversity in devices, browsers, and operating systems (including their unique versions) breeds a lack of interoperability. The differences within device-browser-OS combinations make it extremely difficult for businesses to deliver a uniform user experience across all combinations. This is mainly because the same batch of code may, and often does behave differently on disparate device-browser combinations.

For example, an e-commerce website may perfectly render on Chrome for Samsung S20 but may encounter issues in rendering for an iPad user browsing on Safari. This happens primarily due to OS version-specific bugs or compatibility issues.

This leads to inconsistencies in user experience, particularly for customers visiting a site from multiple platforms. These inconsistencies may force certain customers to bounce and lead to loss of traffic and potential revenue.

What’s the Solution?

There are more than 63,000 device profiles, and fragmentation continues to grow at about 20%. Obviously, testing on all device-browser combinations is not a feasible solution.

The best way to deal with this problem is to ensure that websites are tested on the most widely used devices, browsers, and platforms.

Testing on popular device-browser-OS combinations requires a comprehensive test infrastructure. Setting up such infrastructure demands significant financial investment. Additionally, maintaining and updating the lab with the latest devices at regular intervals can be fairly challenging.

In light of these challenges, testing teams often look towards adopting cloud-based testing infrastructure. A real device cloud lets them gain all the functions of a real device lab without having to invest any of the efforts.

As every device is securely hosted on cloud servers, one need not worry about configuring any devices. Teams also save on maintenance expenses.

With the constant rise in the number of devices and browser versions, fragmentation continues to be a fixture in the digital landscape. Businesses with a digital presence must be prepared for a highly fragmented ecosystem by developing robust web-applications that work flawlessly across devices, browsers, and platforms.