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.
Default Test Profiles
When you add Sites, Calibre creates three default Test Profiles automatically:
| Name | Device Emulation | Connection Speed | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome Desktop | No device emulation. 1280×1024 px screen dimensions. | Cable | Desktop-class, full-screen browser. |
| MotoG4, 3G connection | Motorola Moto G4. 360×640 px screen dimensions. | Regular 3G | A representative of an average global phone with global average mobile connectivity. |
| iPhone, 4G LTE | Apple iPhone 8. 375x667 px screen dimensions. | 4G LTE | A fast phone with world-leading mobile connectivity. |
Device Emulation
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:
| Label | Latency | Downstream | Upstream |
|---|---|---|---|
| No bandwidth throttling | |||
| Regular 2G | 300ms | 256 KB/s | 51.2 KB/s |
| Good 2G | 150ms | 460.80 KB/s | 153.60 KB/s |
| Slow 3G | 400ms | 320 KB/s | 320 KB/s |
| Regular 3G | 300ms | 768 KB/s | 256 KB/s |
| Good 3G | 150ms | 1.57 MB/s | 768 KB/s |
| Emerging markets 3G | 400ms | 3.2 MB/s | 3.2 MB/s |
| Regular 4G | 170ms | 12.19 MB/s | 3.15 MB/s |
| 4G LTE | 70ms | 24 MB/s | 24 MB/s |
| DSL | 30ms | 2.10 MB/s | 1.05 MB/s |
| WiFi | 10ms | 31.46 MB/s | 15.73 MB/s |
| Cable | 20ms | 40 MB/s | 40 MB/s |
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 site speed. 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.