Sessions at O'Reilly Fluent Conference 2015 on Monday 20th April

The mobile Web continues to be a challenging place for developers and user alike. In this workshop, attendees will learn how to diagnose the many different types of compatibility issues that occur in different mobile browsers.

In this workshop we’ll cover tooling and techniques for debugging (and hopefully fixing) JavaScript, CSS, and HTTP issues. These issues are based on real compatibility bugs reported to browser vendors.

If you attend this workshop you will get hands-on experience in the following:

• How to use the responsive modes of Firefox and Chrome DevTools to figure out broken layouts (or test not-so-broken ones)

• How to step debug through troublesome touch event code using remote debugging

• How to use command line tools to make HTTP requests and understand how servers might treat mobile devices differently

• Fixing “old” Flexbox CSS layouts to work with modern implementations

This will be a hands-on session. Attendees should bring their mobile phones or tablets and a USB cord to connect them to their laptops. Feel free to come prepared with your own compatibility issues and we can debug them together as a group.

Everyone strives towards providing a great experience for their users. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to consistently provide a great experience when production environments can vary so drastically. Just between the big name browsers—Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera—there are dozens of different versions, with each viewed on different platforms. You then have yourself countless possibilities of where and what your JavaScript production environment can be. To make matters more complex, all of these environments are going to be different from your local environment and without firsthand information to replicate the scenarios or environments, it becomes very difficult to come up with a diagnosis nonetheless a fix! This talk will examine a few different scenarios where the expected JavaScript behaviors can differ in production environments versus local environments along with some methods for diagnosing and solving. For each of these scenarios, we’ll discuss common causes, manifestations of errors, and unwanted side effects. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools and methods we can use so that we are no longer left alone in the wilderness.