Adding Firefox browser to load test you websites in Team System

At the many talks I give on Team System I always get the same question when demonstrating the options available to define a load test for a web application in Visual Studio Team System.

Because I have a new Talk on team system next Wednesday I decided I needed to find the way to do this. After some searching around my Beta 3 and RC1 setup I found a directory that contains the template files for the browsers you can pick when installing the default options. The folder is :

C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDETemplatesLoadTestBrowsers

I found the list with templates that ship with Team system. The product now has the following definitions available:

• IE 5.5
  
• IE 6.0
  
• Pocket IE 3
  
• Smart Phone
  
• Netscape 6

But when I take a look at my own blog, I see that the 99% of the traffic is generated by

• IE6.0 (82%)
  
• Firefox 1.x ( 13%)
  
• Netscape 6 (1%)
  
• Netscape 3.0(1%)
  
• IE 7.0 (2%)

It appears that creating a new definition file to use with web tests is pretty easy to do. You just create a copy of e.g. the IE6 browser file and change the Browser agent string (and the browser name of course). A great list of browser agent strings can be found here.

So My FireFox definition now looks as follows:

<Browser Name=“Firefox 1.0.7“>

  <Headers>

    <Header Name=“User-Agent“

Value=“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050922 Firefox/1.0.7“ />

    <Header Name=“Accept“ Value=“*/*“ />

    <Header Name=“Accept-Language“ Value=“{{$IEAcceptLanguage}}“ />

    <Header Name=“Accept-Encoding“ Value=“GZIP“ />

  </Headers>

</Browser>

I saved this file in the above mentioned folder and gave it the name FireFox.Browser (you can download it here (click save target as) if you are not willing to type this yourselfJ)

Now in the dropdown boxes for you load testing and performance sessions you will find Firefox 1.0.7 available.