Browser Support

[Thomas Dowling]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Ken Varnum <varnum at umich.edu> wrote:
> This question has undoubtedly come up on Web4Lib before..

Yeah, off and on for about 17 years now.  :-)


> What web browser brands and versions does your library make a formal
> commitment to support for your public web site?

My advice is for web designers to rethink how they approach this.
Browsers are on fast upgrade paths these days, increasingly with
auto-updates, and users may not even know what version they're
running.  Besides, what matters to you is more likely to be the
version of Gecko, Webkit, or Trident they're running, and not so much
the browser.  Even if you could guarantee support for, say, Firefox
12, do you support it with my particular plug-ins, my monitor
resolution and screen width, my security and privacy settings, etc?

The more universally reliable approach (IMO) has always been to target
a sensible set of standards for markup, style, and scripting.  That's
trickier today than in the past, because the de facto standards today
are really "HTML 4 plus parts of HTML5", "CSS 2.1 plus some of 3", and
probably "Whatever JQuery supports."  But that's the direction you
need to go.

You might want to check your logs to figure out which tail-end
browsers (IE6, Firefox 2) you can give yourself permission to stop
worrying about.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
Director of Technologies, Z. Smith Reynolds Library
Wake Forest University
thomas.dowling at gmail.com

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2012-05-20