Test Profiles

Test Profiles allow you to change the conditions that your site is tested under. Calibre can emulate popular devices (like iPhones, iPads and Nexus phones), throttle network connectivity, set custom headers or cookies, block ads or the execution of JavaScript.

Test Profiles can be found for each site in Calibre by navigating to Site → Settings → Test Profiles.

Emulated devices

We leverage Google Chrome device emulation with a few additional mechanisms to ensure that the experience is as close to a real device as possible.

Calibre can emulate the following devices:

• Motorola Moto G4
• iPhone 5
• iPhone 6
• iPhone 6 Plus
• iPhone 7
• iPhone 8
• Nexus 5X
• Nexus 6P
• Galaxy S5
• iPad
• iPad Pro

When Calibre emulates a device, the following occurs:

• The device viewport is changed.
• The User-Agent is set to that of the device.
• The CPU will be slowed to reflect the hardware conditions of the device.

Emulated network connection speed

Calibre limits the bandwidth available to the browser by using pre-configured network speed options that best reflect average global connectivity.

Those pre-configured options are:

Cookies

Setting custom cookies can be helpful in a variety of scenarios. The most common implementations include:

• Authenticating Calibre to your web application.
• Disabling advertising to ease troubleshooting of developer-specific regressions.
• Testing against an A/B test or staff-shipped feature.

Headers

Custom headers are useful for setting Authorisation headers for basic authentication or for triggering certain conditions for your Pages.

Blocking ads

Advertising often has a significant impact on web performance. When creating a Test Profile, select “Block ads” to analyze the impact on speed and accessibility. Calibre’s ad blocking feature is powered by uBlock.

Blocking third party scripts

Calibre automatically detects third party providers during testing, based on a custom instance of Third Party Web dataset. When creating or editing a Test Profile, choose which providers you would like to the requests will be blocked when Snapshots run.

Each provider is listed with a Last Detected date. Some of the registered third parties can no longer be present on your Site but were included in the past. When blocking, make sure to include active third parties for reliable results.

We recommend experimenting with disabling:

• Chat widgets and communication tools.
• Scripts providing polyfills.
• Analytics software.
• Bug tracking scripts.

Blocking JavaScript

Turning off JavaScript is an excellent strategy in discovering potential functionality and accessibility issues when JavaScript execution fails or is not reliable.

When creating or editing a Test Profile, select “Block JavaScript Requests” to ignore all external JavaScript requests. When JavaScript is blocked, all requests except inline script (<script>my script</script>) included on the page will be halted.