Combinatorial Testing of Browsers’ Support for Multimedia

The fifth version of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) standard is widely adopted in the diverse landscape of browser vendors and their continuously upgrading releases. One primary feature of HTML5 is native multimedia playback. The browsers’ native implementations of multimedia support bring lots of benefits such as improved security but require thorough testing, especially on the web page of complex factor combinations according to our manual checking of publicly visible existing tests. This article employs the combinatorial testing technique to trigger failure-inducing factor combinations effectively and to locate them, guided by some extracted properties that cover browsers’ major workflow of processing multimedia. Results are analyzed to give objective suggestions for browser developers to cast light on the places that implementation enhancement could be made, and for web developers to avoid undesirable effects.