Comments on: Which browsers to support?

By: How To Make Mobile Money

How To Make Mobile Money — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:41:03 +0000

Hi Dave and All,

Which browsers to support? As many as possible right?

I find that I don’t have too many problems providing for the 5 major browsers…

I generally develop using FF and cross reference using Opera.

These days though, I’m more interested in providing for mobile browsers because I believe mobile is the future of the web.

Regards

Ade

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:22:53 +0000

In addition to covering the basics with HTML and CSS validation I second the recommendation for using Yahoo’s Graded Browser Support Chart.

Yahoo keeps this list updated to reflect the most used browsers across its sites, which probably is a better sampling of the “average user” than you’d get on blogs with a technical audience. Yahoo classifies browsers into three categories: A, C and X grades. A grade browsers are the mainstream browsers and are always tested against, while a small sampling of C grade browsers are tested. X grade browsers are assumed to provide basic support for, but they aren’t really tested against.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:37:58 +0000

I found a great table at Yahoo! Dev Network (Yes, there’s one!). They use the term “A-Grade browsers” and claim to fully support them. It’s quite good for reference (they got IE, FF Opera and Safary), and I use it for development purposes.

I use Opera 9.5a and I’m getting very annoyed by services “for IE or FF” only. There’re quite a lot of Google products which don’t work smoothly on Opera, or not supported at all.

By the way, MS Silverlight doesn’t support my browser, too.

By: Jos Hirth

Jos Hirth — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:30:44 +0000

I develop with Firefox (webdev+validator extensions), crosscheck with Opera and the W3C validator, and finally I make it work in the current and previous IE version via override style sheets (loaded with conditional statements) if necessary.

So, the user either needs to use a standards compliant browser or a non ancient version of IE. If they aren’t, they are used to broken websites anyways.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:02:37 +0000

I use the same method as well Peter, although I would encourage less experienced web designers to test as they develop each component of a page.

Through experience it’s easy to learn that putting a float and left margin will create a double margin bug in IE6 or that using overflow on parent’s of float’s won’t work in IE6 and height: 1%; will be required to trigger haslayout but for beginner’s it’s vital to fix problems as they arise so that they aren’t overwhelmed by browser bugs.

Good news on the Konqueror front if it does use Webkit in future. The code I develop does usually work in Firefox, Opera, IE7 and Safari without any testing so I usually presume it’ll be fine in Konqueror anyway (maybe wrongly?) but it is worth considering if there are lots of discrepancies in a design within the modern browsers to check Konqueror as well presently.

By: Peter Gasston

Peter Gasston — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 10:32:27 +0000

I believe that the next version of Konqueror is to use the WebKit engine instead of KHTML, so testing on Safari should take care of it.

FWIW, I always code for Firefox, knowing that should pretty much take care of Safari and Opera too – thank god for web standards! Then I test in IE7, then start writing conditional comments for IE6.