Desktop browsers can be extremely useful when developing mobile web sites and apps. Although they are no replacement for testing on actual devices, they do provide robust debugging options and can be used to simulate mobile screen sizes.
Pros
- Desktop browsers are free, familiar, and require no special hardware. Testing on desktop browsers can also be automated using tools such as Visual Studio 2011, or Selenium and Watir.
- Modern desktop browsers can easily be resized to mimic an average smartphone screen (although several can only be resized down to approximately 480px. Due to the popularity of responsive design, there are also a growing number of tools and extensions to assist in triggering a specific screen size. It’s important to remember, however, that due to the width and position of scroll bars (and other browser chrome), resized desktop browser can only provide an approximation of the final mobile viewport size.
- Most desktop browsers provide tools or extensions to swap the default user agent string. This is useful to trigger mobile-specific styling and business logic in cases where these are dependent on the presence of a specific user agent.
- Desktop browsers can also be used in conjunction with developer tools or proxies such as Charles (on Mac) and Fiddler (on .NET) to monitor and debug network traffic and performance issues.
Cons
- Desktop browsers are almost always more powerful than a mobile equivalent. They are more frequently updated, so they include the latest HTML specifications and are also installed on devices with much faster processors. For these reasons, they will never accurately simulate the environment of a smaller, more constrained device.