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I'm looking for a visual regression testing tool for CSS refactoring and see whether or not there are any unintended cascading behavior in a website.

Ideally, the tool that can crawl a website (even locally) and grab snapshots of each page and store it in a single repository.

When run for the second time, it will show the pages that are visually different since the last time it was run.

Even better:

  1. if it can show the overlapper XOR view of the 2 version of the page.
  2. compare rendering results of different browsers (almost like an automated Microsoft Expression Web compare feature).


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5 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Check out Litmus.

It'll crawl your site and take screen captures has damn near every browser you'd want.

In addition to the core functionality Litmus also allows you to to track bugs, log in to private sites, and allows you to publish compatibility reports from your tests.

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It seems it have the issues that Browser Shots have (site have to be online, and no crawler). But seems extensible enough with API support. will look at it. Thanks –  ronaldwidha Mar 22 '10 at 7:20
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Here's a great writeup on CSS regression testing using PhantomCSS. Their basic example provides exactly what the original question desired: visual diffs between two commits.

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Check out Browser Shots. This is a free service.

There are some restrictions on how many tests you can run each day as a free user. But unlike Litmus; you can run tests on all supported browsers--Litmus only allows free users to test their websites on Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 2.

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It seems that Browser Shots is having some technical difficulties at the moment. I've used the service myself for about a year, and this is the first time I've encountered any problems. –  roosteronacid Mar 17 '10 at 13:05
It seems to be up again now. The issues I have with it are: 1. the site that I want to check has to be up online 2. it doesnt have a crawler built in. The 2nd point I can deal with, whereas the 1st one is a deal breaker. Thanks for the response though. still good to know, but just not applicable in my situation. –  ronaldwidha Mar 22 '10 at 7:12
No worries. Always glad to help :) –  roosteronacid Mar 22 '10 at 8:37
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I know this question has been posted for awhile but I wanted to mention about a new CSS regression tool called wraith by bbc-news.


It utilizes tools such as phantomJS and imagemagick.


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What you've described is precisely what Mogotest does. We can log into your site, take screenshots for all the pages you've configured, and do automated comparison using the principles of Web Consistency Testing.

We also keep a full track of history so we can tell you exactly when something broke (and what your site looked at that time) and even cooler, we can detect when you've fixed something. And finally, we snapshot your code at each test run so we can show you exactly what changed for each issue.

Sorry for the self-promoting nature of this answer. I just wanted to be thorough in addressing what you're looking for.

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