Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but if testing on your browser means downloading a 4GB+ image every couple months and having it take up all my memory in a clunky VM and messing around with how it gets its IP and then trying to update itself with another multi-gigabyte windows update while I'm tethering and did I mention you have to redo it all every couple of months?... then I'm not testing against your browser.
One thing is testing if the fancy custom react component works properly in a particular browser at all, that should be the case in a certain browser+version across OSes and you'd want that available all the time.
The other thing is testing if some CSS is acting up in a specific Browser/Browserversion/OS/Screensize/Phone combination; that is probably a job for QA.
You've used these, right? It's an enormous pain to have to spin up a separate VM per version of Edge/IE to get a "Your copy of Windows might be stolen" message and have some finite period of time to test.
I appreciate that they have these, but it's a real annoying hoop to jump through, and I've long suspected the hope is you'll just have your company buy a cheap windows box for testing.
I can test the other browsers without doing this dance.
I'm a web developer with an Android smartphone and Ubuntu as my main OS, Windows as my secondary.
My primary means of testing on iOS/Safari is to be very careful about which features I target by checking caniuse.com and the JS compatibility list. And that doesn't protect you against iOS randomly doing something stupid like pretending to give you access to localStorage in private browsing mode but actually write everything to /dev/null instead.
Exactly. And only because most web developers are doing their job and work around all those annoying little bugs in Safari /that never seem to get fixed), the average Safari user thinks it is an entirely usable browser.
Or more specifically, because so many web developers use Macs and therefore Safari (or have superiors that use Macs and Safari) day to day and don't have to do any explicit testing to find those bugs.
I tried this once, but the terms are onerous, or they were when I tried it last. They expire frequently, they're huge (and I am on mobile broadband, which becomes very expensive if I run out of my data allotment in a month), they're limited in terms of versions.
Microsoft could change the game by open sourcing Edge, but I guess the key goal is getting all that user data, not having the best browser. (But, Google manages to get all the user data and have a mostly open source browser that people unbelievably have a lot of positive feelings about.)
I used those VMs maybe 10 years ago (I remeber one with Windows 8 maybe.)
Then I stopped and none of my customers ever complained. Either nobody uses IE/Edge or the web applications I work on are too simple and render well in every browser on every OS.
Actually I remember a few complaints: somebody using IE7 (?) on Windows XP when it was already EOL (my customer decided not to support it), a bug of Safari we investigated and worked around (can't remember the details), something not working on Chrome because I tested on Firefox (my bad, one such a bug in 10 years.)
Am I sorry about the death of Edge? Not really. Safari next, but being Apple what it is, this is not going to happen. I wish we have only browsers that work across operating systems.