views:

129

answers:

12

Now, you might think to yourself "Of course I do. It's not hard". But trust me, after what I went through today to send a wire transfer using a simple form, I wonder if most web developers even care about people using browsers other than IE.

Today, using Firefox 3.5, I logged into my bank's website to do some banking. While filling out an online form, I noticed some issues. For one, since the receiving bank is not in the United States, I could not choose a state in the dropdown. But apparently, I needed to choose a state or not I could not move ahead. Caught in a loop here, I simply chose a state at random.

Then, I wanted to write a note to make sure the person who is handling the wire transfer knew the state selection was merely to get past a programming oversight. So I checked the "Yes, add a note" radiobutton to activate the note textarea. But, the textarea remained disabled. Frustrated (included some cussing and extreme disbelief), I opened up the site in IE. What do you know, the form now worked like a charm.

Honestly, all the issues I mentioned above are really not hard to do in any browser. They're not progressive enhancements, but probably basic building blocks in any web forms (showing extra information on demand, etc).

So, here's the question: were you ever caught in a situation you could not provide a usable working interface for any browser? In that case, what was it that made it hard to get it working in all browsers?

Most browsers here mean (IE6, 7, 8, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome)

+1  A: 

Alpha transparency with IE6.

Ben S
But there are workarounds for alpha transparency in IE6 though
Dhana
There's a JS hack.
Stefan Kendall
+3  A: 

If it's up to me I'll write for and test on: IE8, IE8 (compatibility mode), FF3+ and Chrome (which uses Webkit so should give a good approximation of Safari).

You will find that different companies have different views on supported browsers. Some will mandate IE6+ and certain versions of FF. Others will only mandate IE and won't spend any time making it work on other browsers.

A few will specifically disallow certain browsers (eg IE6 for security reasons) but that is not as common as I would certainly like.

Some sites care about mobile browsers. Some don't. Being usable on an iPhone is arguably of as much importance (if not moreso) than running on Safari in some cases.

Basically it depends on the Website and who's paying for it.

Also "support" is an ambiguous term. The general principle applied is one of graceful degradation, meaning you have all the eye candy on the latest browsers. On older browsers it might look worse but it should generally still function. The worst sites (from a developer's standpoint) are the ones that "need" to be pixel perfect on every browser.

cletus
+1. Sadly, if you work on business-y web apps, you're likely to find that 70% or so of your users are on IE 6. Even more annoying to test when you have XP SP3 on your work machine, and need to remote desktop into a VM to load IE6 up...
TM
A: 

The majority of these issues that I have seen result from CSS features being supported in one browser and not another. The easiest solution, in my experience, is to maintain and serve up a separate stylesheet for IE6 (let's not pretend that IE6 isn't the problem most of the time). The rest of the problems I've seen can mostly by solved by sticking to simple, clean designs.

Imagist
A: 

Short answer is yes. I have had trouble supporting multiple browsers in a "consistent" way.

Long answer: Most problems can be overcome. But occasionally you have to offer "dumbed down" content for one browser or another. The key is letting the the browser degrade gracefully. I'ts annoying that you still have to do this but unfortunately it's reality.

Jeremy Wall
A: 

if the web apps used by internal company, i would recommend them to use Firefox or Chrome as their browser and they agree with that.

But if I develop web for public and put on internet, i have to support for IE as well ... but i would write like not supported for Ie 6 :)

nightingale2k1
A: 

I typically try to test on Firefox and IE in my own work -- more browswers if a client / employer is paying.

John Lockwood
+1  A: 

Depends.

At work, our software is used by big boring companies, so we have about 80% of the users on IE. About 70% of those are on IE 6. The number of Firefox users is extremely low and the number of page views (not users, VIEWS) that come from Chrome/Safari/Opera/etc is under 100 per month.

Most of the devs use Firefox + Firebug however, so we "support" Firefox along with IE6/7/8. Generally (although not always), if something works in firefox it will work in chrome/safari as well, but we never test those browsers and I doubt we'd fix any issues reported for them.

However, for my personal projects, I "support" Firefox/Chrome/Opera since that's what I use myself. I actually do check these browsers to make sure things work from time to time, but generally they don't have a ton of inconsistencies between each other.

If somebody came to me saying "hey there is this problem with your site in IE8" then I'd take a look at it. As for IE6, I don't even have any machines (or virtual machines) at home that can run it (all my boxes are linux or win vista, and my win XP VM is patched to SP3, and all windows boxes have moved to IE8). I'm not really interested in setting up an unpatched VM just to test an incredibly outdated browser that I don't really like to code for on my free time.

I'm just praying that Win7 will be popular enough to finally start killing off IE6/IE7 clients.

TM
A: 

"Then, I wanted to write a note to make sure the person who is handling the wire transfer knew the state selection was merely to get past a programming oversight."

Usually that kind of mistake is a good warning sign that the developers haven't considered anyone outside their own team in terms of end users so it wouldn't be surprising that the site also doesn't work on common browsers.

It's tempting to think that a site that doesn't work in, for example, Firefox, isn't worth the effort anyway since the application itself is probably poorly designed for anyone who isn't in their 60% core audience.

Colin Coghill
+1  A: 

Yes I do.

Supporting browsers other than IE has never been so important, IE's market share is no longer over 90%, those days are long gone. Besides, with the number of the internet users rapidly increasing (almost 1.5 billion so far), it's very important to support a browser used by even 1% of users (1% of 1.5bil = 15 million users. this is still a lot).

I think what you experienced was a badly designed site, or it was probably developed some ago when IE was used by most internet users.

Waleed Eissa
Nope, the site is actually relatively new.
Dhana
ok, it's the first assumption then :)
Waleed Eissa
A: 

I don't believe that a site I create should fail or be unusable in any browser. Core functionality should always work (clearly not the case in your example). It's a priority for me.

That said, sometimes that means I end up doing more work, even when the client hasn't specified it, and occasionally when it's on my own dime instead of theirs.

There are definitely cases where older browsers don't support the technology (or support it so brokenly) that some features don't work. I'm not gonna ask IE6 to try and deal with HTML5 elements.

But like I said, I prefer people to be able to navigate the site and complete the basic tasks on the site in the browser of their choice.

Gabriel Hurley
A: 

Manually testing for all major browsers is not feasible anymore, you have to use automatic cross browser testing tools such as http://www.browserseal.com

Demiurg
A: 

Were you ever caught in a situation you could not provide a usable working interface for any browser?

Personally, no. But I’m annoyed daily by the fact that I can’t use child and attribute selectors in IE 6. If I could rely on them being supported, I could write less code, and thus my code would be quicker to write, and more maintainable.

For personal projects going forward, I’m going to use JavaScript (e.g. Dean Edwards’ IE8.js library) to bring IE up to snuff in terms of CSS and HTML5 support.

Google are phasing out IE 6 support for Google Docs, so they’re presumably finding that it’s not worth the effort. (I’d imagine that decision is based on the performance of Google Docs on such an old, and therefore slow, JavaScript engine.)

Paul D. Waite