DEVOPSdigest

The heaviest testing done by the e-commerce industry is against the Apple platform in all areas, according to a new Sauce Labs report on the most tested OS and browsers by industry.

Based off anonymous data from tests run on Sauce Labs over a 90-day period, the report compares trends in eleven industries. E-commerce is the only industry to test heavily against Macs (46 percent), compared to Windows (32 percent) and Linux (22 percent) - which dominate in all other industries.

Further, e-commerce is unique by testing predominantly against Safari (45 percent), compared with Firefox (15 percent) and Chrome (35 percent).

Healthcare and consulting, for instance, test overwhelmingly against Chrome (80 percent).

The findings suggest Apple is a significant factor for e-commerce, most likely due to consumer use of Macs and iOS devices. They also infer the preference of offloading the maintenance of an iOS testing grid (which is notoriously more complex and expensive than Windows) to a cloud provider.

Additional key findings include:

■ Technology tests the widest variety of unique browser/OS combinations (average of 201). This is followed by finance (average of 175.5), and media (average of 156).

■ The average number of unique browsers tested against by all industries is 114.

■ Firefox and Chrome are the top browsers tested by most industries, with Firefox leading in the media and nonprofit sectors.