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. ;-)

Why create a Web Application?

So you've decided that you want to create a software application. There is a ton of things that you'll need to decide, but one of the most important, is where your application is going to live.

Today's choice is:

• Create an online Web Based Application?

or

• Create a typical Distributable Application?

Both have specific advantages and disadvantages we'll consider.

One of the biggest things to consider is the target audience for your application. If they all run Mac, building a Windows application isn't going to cut it.

Platform Independence:

One of the biggest advantages to building a web based application is that you are not limited to any single OS (Operating System), and in fact, you are pretty much unlimited in terms of the OS's that you can support! (Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, BlackBerry, iPhone, Other?)

On the other hand building an application for the OS world means picking a single OS, or using a technology that is OS independent like Java.

Software Piracy:

This is an often overlooked aspect of software development. If you build a cool Windows based application, sooner or later someone will hack it and place the cracked version on the Internet to share with everyone. On the other hand, if you build a web based application, there is no CD/DVD or download that the user gets and thus they can't hack your code to create their own cracked version. In order to "copy" your application, they would need to get a hold of your source code (not easy), then host their own version on the public Internet (which costs money) at which point the legal battle to stop them is much easier than trying to track down thousands of copied CD's.

Device Independence:

If you build a web application you can extend the client "reach" by being able to target more than one device. Sure, all of your clients will have a computer, but they may also have a smartphone (e.g. BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.) Being able to support multiple devices is a huge bonus for any application that you can build.

Remote Access:

If you are out of your office, away from home, on vacation and want to access your application being able to access it online is the ultimate in flexibility.

Application Interaction:

As a final note, having your application online makes the possibility of interacting with other online applications and sites an instant option in fact, the whole Internet is just waiting there to be tapped into.


The choice is all yours of course, however since this Blog is focused on Web Applications, lets presume that you've weighed the options and chosen to create a web based application that is accessible to all OS's, multiple browsers & many other devices.

Smart Move!