Automated Repair of Layout Cross Browser Issues Using Search-Based Techniques

A consistent cross-browser user experience is crucial for the success of a website. Layout Cross Browser Issues (XBIs) can severely undermine a website’s success by causing web pages to render incorrectly in certain browsers, thereby negatively impacting users’ impression of the quality and services that the web page delivers. Existing Cross Browser Testing (XBT) techniques can only detect XBIs in websites. Repairing them is, hitherto, a manual task that is labor intensive and requires significant expertise. Addressing this concern, our paper proposes a technique for automatically repairing layout XBIs in websites using guided search-based techniques. Our empirical evaluation showed that our approach was able to successfully fix 86% of layout XBIs reported for 15 different web pages studied, thereby improving their cross-browser consistency.