Option to addon specific browsers, especially premium browsers.

Voters 13

A
+ 7 voters
R

Live

Eugene Cheah

Not all users would want all the browsers all the time.

The idea is to allow users, to take a base plan that best suite their need. While purchasing either one-time (day pass, week pass, or a 1 month pass) or a subscription addons.

To unlock individual browser concurrency options.

To clarify, this **will not** replace any of the existing plans : uilicious.com/pricing/
This is to add more flexibility, in creating plans, that are in-between various offerings / tiers

---

Alternative formats would be do by "number of testruns" or "number of test minutes"

however I have very strong reservations, on potential confusion that may occur on this, especially on "rounding errors" in splitting those minutes.

There is also the issue of the macos licensing terms not allowing sharing an instance within a 24 hour window - making the current complicated scheduling system (used internally) - much more complicated (worse case scenario is 1 team doing 1 minute safari test, every 24 hours - locking that mac mini) - if we support such an option we will be running on a statistical gamble for this.

This Apple restriction of 1 user to 1 mac mini effectively, also puts a huge upfront cost of supporting 1 safari concurrency at $700 minimum, scaling upwards once you add on the hosting, and electricity cost. Because of this, there is only a handful of "infrastructure providers" for mac mini's (we do not run our own datacenter), and in general all existing providers ain't "cheap".

---

For those who are upvoting this request : Please do add in some feedback on which format you would prefer, or if you are ok with either.

04-03-2022 -

Activity Newest / Oldest

Muzdaheer Amil

The Browser Add-on Feature is now live! You now have the option to add-on test runners or other browsers to your existing plans so that you can have more flexibility in your testing needs.

Muzdaheer Amil

Status changed to: Live

Pascal Brennecke

**I suggested this before ..**
(Not a lawyer!)
The german law forbids to bind licenses to Hardware like Apple does and Microsoft did.
Here's the verdict about this case:
www.jurpc.de/jurpc/show?id=20000220
No matter what the Apple TOS tells... The law is above it.

**This means:**
If you own a legally bought copy of Mac OS (CD/DVD/USB Drive) and/or an Apple Device like the Mac (mini), you can do with the license what you like with it.
Therefore if you own a Mac OS/Mac Device you can legally run Hackintosh, run it in a VM,... and so on.

**Your Options:**
- Buy a lot of (used) Mac Minis and run your own Mac Mini Server farm. (If they're in idle, you can rent them or use them for mining, whatever...)
- Fund a Company in Germany, buy old Mac hardware to own a licencs, buy/rent a dedicated server with local access, get UnRaid, spin up MacOS VMs, create some automation magic (and contribute it to the UnRaid/Autoamtion community).
This can be easily done for example with UnRaid:
github.com/SpaceinvaderOne/Macinabox
Note: Unraid is a NAS Software but the community found ways to extend it with community packages. It's possible to expose the Server to the public.
- Use the SAAS from Hetzner, a famous german hosting provider:
www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1
They just cost € 64.02 / month - and if you ask them to support a startup and aks them for volume discount, they surely help you provide you discounts. (You're If interested for testing first, I can give you 20€ in cloud credit - DM me in Discord @pbre )

This is a medium sized investion in budget and time but on the long run you'll save $$$

**Suggestion**
- Do a SWOT-Analysis before you start :P
- Ask a (german) lawyer
- If this is successful, allow me free lifetime access to Safari Automation.

Eugene Cheah

Btw we actually did somewhat explore this route in some form prior.

The TLDR is as long as we operate internationally, and our customers are intentional, we are still open to litigation. Even if we are sure we would "win" in the end in some cases.

Considering the state of the startup, handling litigation across multiple nations, is easily beyond all our budgets.

That being said, if the law ever extends to the whole of EU (and there is some movement, together with the right to repair stuff)... things may change.

In fact I dun even mind if apple charges for the OS, if they made the changes to comply (they used to for their old server OS). Cause that would put them in the same place as windows. Its also easier on my infra planning

Shi Ling

Status changed to: In progress

Shi Ling

Status changed to: Planned

Eugene Cheah

Engineering work has been greenlighted, and started on this feature 🌮🌮🌮

More details will be provided once we got the pricing details finalised. For now back to work on our end on supporting this feature 🔧

Note: The system was never designed to handle browser concurrency separately, so it is quite a large overhaul. From billing to job scheduling, which we want to do right - Its not just "adding a browser" - we are trying to get this done before the appsumo deal period is finished - however if there are **bugs** found in the process. We will delay it.

And yes : We use Uilicious, to test Uilicious !

Eugene Cheah

[ this was a notice for duplicate upvoty - which got merged here ]

Shi Ling

Merged with: Ad-hoc / Pay as you go option for "premium" browsers

Yume H

I don't agree not all users. We are building an enterprise product and we'd pay a premium to be able to test in Chrome, FF, Safari and Edge. The reason most like us would want to "test" cross-browsers. Limiting from a product perspective IMO doesn't make sense since we are going into market as a web/mobile product across markets. I think that is not realistic to limit testing. So my vote is let us pay for it if we want it. I am not sure I'd go back to the 80's with pay per minute either, but if we are willing to pay higher fees to have cross-browser testing, to consider offering it OR let us use our own CDN if costs are an issue. Not sure, but I'd be willing to host on my own platform if that's the case. Thanks.

Eugene Cheah

Hi Yume H, apologies if its not clear.

Premium browsers are already available at our cloud plans : uilicious.com/pricing/

In that use-case, it runs based on the concurrency offering, if you want 4 or 8 concurrency of all the browser we support (there is no "by the minute") - there is such a plan (Pro-Plus).

This add-on options, will not remove those plans, but supplement it for other users, who are not on the highest plans.

Jens Wolff

That would be fair for both sides and a great addition! Would really love to see that happen! +1

Because of the locking for 24 hours, I would prefer to see day/week/month and perhaps also year passes. So you don't have the risk of 24h block for a 1 minute test. ✅

Are there also these kind of limitations for Internet Explorer?

Perhaps you could also think of adding these kind of addon-passes for concurring jobs, seperately priced.
This could be very helpful if you need some more parallel power for a limited time. 💪🚀

Eugene Cheah

IE11 and Edge2019 requires the use of windows server enterprise licenses which faces similar issues - but is not as ridiculous as the 24 hours locking involved for a mac mini. Its also possible to serve on-demand using microsoft azure cloud.

While still costly, it makes possible for it to be "by the minute" in some way.

This contrasts against how we actually run most of our chrome / firefox / edgechromium, on servers from datacenter providers instead of the major cloud providers. In order to make them affordable for the LTD plans - Hope that clarifies why edge2019 / IE11 is in a separate tier (and on azure)

Perhaps its a good sign that IE11 is finally dying, that most folks do not demand for it to be addd on (i want to get rid of IE11 from the internet)

Eugene Cheah

[reserved - was trying to use this as some pesudo voting feature, but realise its kinda wierd]