Slowness in BitBar Live

Question

Has anyone had success with using BitBar Live for testing a website?We're US based and hosted.&nbsp; Over the years we've tried on several occasions to use BitBar Live for mobile device viewing of our website with no success.&nbsp; We've tried multiple devices in each region US, US-West, US-East with roughly the same results.&nbsp; We rarely get a successful connection to our sites both Preprod (via secure tunnel) or our Production (via direct internet connection) and if we do it's frustratingly slow and the users give up.I'd like to move away from having to buy physical devices for UX developers, BA's, QA/UAT testers but we've never been happy with BB Live's reliability or responsiveness.Note: Automated device testing with BitBar Device cloud when called via TestComplete works fine for both Desktop tests (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and Mobile tests (Chrome, Firefox, Safari).I'm looking for any suggestionsThanks

dshapiroqa · Answer

I have used Bitbar over the past couple of years, primarily to crossbrowser test Safari. The experience has always been terrible. Today and in various sessions over the past week, I have tried to test using Mac OS 13 - US and Safari 18. The experience is so laggy that we cannot reliably evaluate how parts of our application is behaving when comparing to other browsers and OS that I can test installed on my Windows 11 laptop.The problem starts as soon as I try to log into our application. It takes forever for the keystrokes to catch up when typing in the username or password field. The simulator even gets hung up sometimes between upper and lower case. Once we get past that and log in, we try to see how Safari is behaving on a feature using common mouse-over highlighting on a report. We though that the feature was not working in Safari and this set off all kinds of concerns. Then a developer on our team used his native macbook with Safari and this made clear that the issue was completely in BitBar and not on a real Mac with Safari.What's the point of BitBar if the performance is so awful that we cannot do basic crossbrowser testing evaluation?!I've used BitBar at the office with work laptop and at home on my personal laptop, both on high speed Ethernet and it is the same lousy-laggy experience! It's been this way for the past couple of years. We need to find a better tool and move on!