The BrowserMob Blog

BrowserMob officially opened for business today. While there are still several last-minute items to do (our FAQ is still not fully answered), we’ve decided that after months of polish and preparation, we’re now ready to open up BrowserMob to the public.

So what is it?

BrowserMob is the world’s first load testing service that uses real browsers (Firefox 3.0.3 to be exact). It’s on-demand, low-cost, and super easy to get started with. And best of all: you only have to pay for what you use.

What real browsers?

Our company is named BrowserMob. We named it that because we believe that as web applications get more complex, testing them with incomplete simulators does not properly prepare you for the real world.

For example, other load testing tools simulate HTTP GETs and POSTs but require painful scripting efforts to make sure that the the simulated traffic handles cookies, parameters, and other dynamic capabilities. Similarly, when something goes wrong they can’t show you what a user would have seen, since they don’t run a browser a user would use.

BrowserMob can.

By leveraging the popular Selenium project, it makes recording painless. It also generates the same traffic characteristics real users would and reports errors in a way that make sense to you: with screenshots of every individual browser error.

What about the cost?

While it’s true that using real browsers is in some cases 100 times more computationally expensive than simulating traffic, we set out to create a product that was not only better, but also more affordable.

We’ve achieved that by leveraging open source and other modern infrastructure technology, such as Amazon Web Services, to keep our overall costs low. Our goal isn’t to milk our customers for everything they have, but instead to provide a great product and build an efficient small business in the process.

What’s next?

Now that we’ve “gone public”, our attention will turn to two things: getting the word out and continually improving BrowserMob to meet the needs of our customers.

We’ll use this blog as a vehicle to communicate the progress of both of these tasks, as well as to discuss general load testing advice, industry news, and anything else that seems relevant. So please, subscribe to our RSS and contact us to continue the discussion.

Thanks, and welcome to BrowserMob!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Announcements. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.