Browser Support

Choosing your Browser Support Level

Choosing which browsers and which versions to support for your Web Application is a serious consideration.

For every browser you need to support you will need to do testing to ensure that your application works properly and if there are issues you will need to spend time debugging and fixing the issues.

In addition to each browser there is the issue of Operating Systems. Do you support browsers on all Operating Systems? Have you considered how you plan to test this?

Finally the most important question is: "Does it make smart & financial business sense for me to support browser X?"

So how do you determine what browsers to support?

Step 1: Operating Systems

Are there any Operating Systems that you can not justify supporting? e.g. If you are making an application for the Enterprise market do you need to support Apple or Linux? I'm not saying to drop support, but rather to consider what percentage of your users will be using these Operating Systems.

Step 2: Browsers

• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Safari
• Chrome
• Opera
• Camino
• Konqueror

The good news is that Netscape is no longer a browser you need to support - the bad news is that you will need to support several if not all of the above browsers. If you don't need to support Linux you can remove Konqueror from your support list. If you don't need to support Mac's you can drop support for Camino...... but the top 5: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome & Opera... are likely going to be on your support list.

The even better news is that Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all do an excellent job of supporting web standards... which means if you make your application work in one of them it will likely work just fine in the other 3.

Step 3: Internet Explorer

The bad news is Internet Explorer. With a staggering dominance of the browser market, especially in the corporate enterprise world you will almost guarantee-ably have to support IE.

So in my opinion which browsers should you support?

• Internet Explorer 7, 8 (if you have to support IE6 I really pity you, but the good news is that even Microsoft isn't supporting it after 2014)
• Firefox 3, 3.5
• Safari 3, 4
• Chrome 1, 2
• Opera 9+
• Camino 1.6
• Konqueror 3.5

Feel free to support other browsers like Pogo, Maxthon, Arora, LunaScape as well if you like ;-) they are growing in popularity every day esp. as IE6's market share slides.

Once you've got all of these covered you'll need to consider mobile browsers... but we'll leave that for another post.

Step 4: Money talks

At the end of the day it will be your customers that determine which browsers you will support. I just hope for your stress levels that IE6 isn't in your supported browser list. ;-)