Back in March, I came across John Resig's articulate post about the pain of frontend testing in general. Unvealing the dirty "secret" that no one likes to talk about but everyone has to deal with at some point in development. But unlike other folks' rants on this topic, he proposed a solution that would tackle this and take advantage of the internet audience. I was very much looking forward to his architecture diagram coming to fruition.
The TestSwarm source is now available on GitHub. The interesting parts are here and repositories for libraries under test are here. By the way, GitHub is awesome; albeit, it would be cool if it had permalink for generating friendly url for linking purposes.
Granted, this is still in fairly early stage, but there is great potential for a distributed testing environment. Having said that, testswarm.com itself may have a harder time getting the entire spectrum of users/browsers as its audience will most likely be developer/techie folks. However, perhaps the spirit of this effort can live on in public sites that are highly trafficked?
For example, if a user with a specific browser agent comes in, you could either display a link to TestSwarm and politely ask them to participate in these efforts OR ask them to participate in a local "TestSwarm" instance that will also run through your own js aside from shared js.
Back during the myspace days, I would come across all sorts of user agents. Some were obviously bots whereas others were legit but unexpected scenarios. Who would've thought at the time that there'd be decent # of users accessing myspace on their PS3? Not that a dev shop would want to be in a reactive mode of fixing things post-production push, but this could fill the niche of covering environments that shops simply don't have available. The hope is that this is a win-win situation for both the user and the site (and potentially rest of the internet community). Lots of exciting stuff coming out from Mozilla with this and Bespin. Outside Mozilla, looking forward to seeing the latest mobile results from QuirksBlog.