Should small companies code their sites to support Chrome?

Question

Hi, I work on small sites for tanning salons and stuff. We don't support active x specific stuff on IE, and we support FF. I've noticed some weird behavior with chrome. My broswer stats say <1% of my visitors use chrome.

I've heard people say it's nowhere near best in class. But, I like the way everything runs in it's own process and stuff.

Is chrome going ot get popular enough that I need to code for it? By the time it gets popular, will it's weird renedering get fixed?

xox

new info

thanks for all your help guys! to the guy that asked about safari on a mac, I'm at about 2% for all versions of safari, so my guess is that that's mostly mac and some iphone / ipod

I really like the answer about not coding for a specific browser - I've seen browser sniffer stuff but I think it's weak :-P

Answer 1

Chrome is still in early beta and it's rendering is not bug free, I also experience critical UI issues in Chrome. I do plan on my web apps working in Chrome, but I've made a decision not to change anything until Chrome hits a more mature level.

Google has recently said they will be bringing Chrome to a non beta state very soon (unlike their past history of leaving things in beta for 5yrs or so).

Also, if you plan on using Chrome to webdev in this beta state, you'll want to install the "Developer Channel" which gives you access to a newer versions than the public version, very important at this stage of the browser. As of 12/10/2008 the dev version of Chrome is 0.4.154.33

Answer 2

its a good reason to improve support for WebKit browsers in general (do you not have any customers using Safari on a Mac?)

Answer 3

Chrome uses WebKit, a fairly standard rendering engine. Safari uses it also, and it doesn't sound like WebKit is going away. If you have the necessary resources, I would advise to look into fixing it up.

Answer 4

Probably not yet: Chrome is still changing fairly quickly, and they're targeting being fully compliant with the various standards and tests. If you try to follow Chrome right now, you'll probably be tracking lots of little flaky changes that you'll eventually want to reverse.

Answer 5

Write code to standards first, then for different rendering engines if needed. Never design websites for specific browsers, it's a very slippery slope.

Answer 6

I would test the pages with Chrome. If you've done good job, there shouldn't be that many problems.

Actually it IS possible to write one code that works on all browsers (well, maybe not IE 6 or earlier) ;)

Answer 7

Jimmy has a very good point there, Chrome and Safari are both based off WebKit. If it fails on Chrome, chances are good it's likely breaking on Safari, Nokia S60 browser and the rest as well.

Answer 8

In my view it all depends on your clients, and their users. I'd check your weblogs and see if it is a significant percentage.

If it's getting significant, to the point where your clients might be loosing money, i'd discuss it with them and see if they're willing to pay extra to bring your sites in line with chrome.

Personally I wouldn't worry about it till it gets to at least 1% consistently. And even then I'd still talk to your clients about it.

On the other hand it's quite possible it'll get 5% market share in the next year or so. It is Google after all.

Answer 9

The key is to write to standards, using semantically correct and well-formed markup. Make the base implementation work for most browsers (as many as possible) and make adjustments to handle the remaining ones.

Writing sites that are tailored to be "best viewed with" a certain browser perpetuate the browser vendor's inability to strive for standards compliance.

Answer 10

I don't think you should need to code anything specific for Chrome. If they say that web standards are important to them, then Chrome will eventually follow those standards to a tee.

I also don't believe Chrome will get very popular. When I saw it the first thing I thought was "Wow... Mozilla with a G print on it." And I have not really been very impressed since.

Bottom line: You should make an attempt to make your site support the major browsers. Opera, IE, Firefox. Usually, following web standards and best practices will accomplish this. Other times you need to create work arounds or force browsers to act a certain way. I.E. Firefox and IE use a different border model. You can force at least FF to use the same border model as IE does.

Answer 11

If you are doing Javascript work and this is resulting in noticeable differences between browsers, then I'd definitely recommend using a third-party framework like jQuery so you can work with a common browser-agnostic interface. If, however, your differences are due to the HTML/CSS on your pages, then I would always prioritise the most popular browsers according to your site's statistics. If <1% are using Chrome then I would seriously consider spending the time on other tasks instead of investigating something that may actually be a problem with a new browser that is still in very early beta.

Answer 12

As an end user, I get a bit annoyed if some site doesn't support Chrome: basically, I begin to ignore it, but not before writing a complaint first. That said, it's sometimes probably Chrome's fault, not the designers. However, I don't really care whose fault it is, since all I want is the page rendered properly and functioning as expected.

Answer 13

I'm aware of several large companies that have outlawed use of Chrome until it allows installation on other than the C drive. I would guess that if Chrome overcomes this and some of the UI issues mentioned elsewhere, it will become very popular. I think you should plan to support Chrome.

Answer 14

Both the larger web businesses and smaller web businesses that I personally work with do nothing with Chrome. It isn't on their browser radar. And some of the larger ones are big ecommerce.

Therefore, I do not devote coding time towards supporting Chrome. I do run it for research and market development purposes.

Answer 15

I never code to support beta products. Wait for them to finish making their software before you start changing yours to support it.

Answer 16

You should target browsers based on what your customers are using. If 80% of your customers are using IE, then it would be prudent to test your site primarily on IE. If you know your customers are using FF, then it would be prudent to test your site primarily on FF.

That said, Google Chrome's market share is basically a rounding error, so no--I wouldn't bother. Unless, of course, you know ahead of time that a significant number of your users are using it.

(e.g. for an iphone app I wrote, we found that a majority of our users were browsing to our site from an iphone--I know, absolutely amazing, earth shattering concept. Thus, we started doing the majority of our web site testing against the iphone browser)

Answer 17

First target the current standard, then prioritize by how much ruckus your users make (if you have a very vocal 1% is still a very vocal 1% of your userbase)

Answer 18

Even if Chrome is out of beta, for me is still in beta. Because Chrome can't display well png24 with opacity change (i tried to do a fadeIn/fadeOut with jquery on a png image and i get an ANNOYING white flash before image animation; you can see the problem here)