Which browsers your applications "officially" supports?

Question

What browsers does your latest project "officially" support?

For the browsers you chose not to support, what were the key reasons not to support them?

Answer 1

We generally support (and by support I mean test on) IE6, IE7 and FF2.

The reasons for supporting these browsers and not others is simply that you can only easily support so many different configurations and this is enough of a choice for customers to be able to use a supported browser that they like / can use.

Answer 2

IE6 IE7 FF2/3 and Safari

Safari is for the apple mac folks.

Firefox was kind of imperative because I believe most serious web developer will be debugging their websites in Firefox/Firebug anyway.

By utilizing some of the freely available frameworks like YUI and jQuery, supporting all the different browsers has became a snap for me, so why not?

Answer 3

At work we only officially support IE7 (and that only recently) for intranet-based applications. For the internet I write for Firefox 3 (using Web Standards), and test against Firefox 2, IE7, IE6 and Safari for Windows (although now it seems Chrome will be added to this). I also test against Lynx for accessibility.

Key reasons? I only go with IE6 because of its ubiquity (popularity with the Average Joe) - I opt for browser standards, I suppose.

Answer 4

My customer standardized on IE7 for its internal-use software, which I write.

But if I wrote something for public use, I would support:

• IE7, FF3 and Safari 3, since they are popular and current.
• IE6 if and only if the audience is not comprised of technology-lovers, because everyone else wants it to "just work", which is why they are still running XP.
• Neither FF2 nor Safari 2, since their users don't view "upgrade" as a four-letter word.

Finally, I would not yet support but would give special attention to Chrome, in one case: After POSTing, then making another request, and finally going "Back", you are forced to re-post in order to see the page. The design of the application should take this into account by POSTing and GETting where appropriate.

Also, please change the title of this topic. It doesn't make immediate sense, so if it comes up on Google it's likely to be skipped over.

Update: Now that it's 2010,

• If I started a new project, I would support the latest: IE8, FF3.6, Safari 4, Chrome 4.
• It is definitely time to support Chrome, as it is becoming more popular than Safari.
• I would still try to support IE6, just a little, if my audience was a very general one.

Answer 5

I personally support Opera 9.5, FF2, 3 and IE6, 7.
By supporting Opera 9.5 you mainly support most compliant browsers.
FF2 and 3 need only little work from there on.

Then IE comes in and ruins the party, but that's just how it is.

Answer 6

IE6,IE7, FF2,FF3, opera and with some rare problem Safari

Answer 7

By utilizing some of the freely available frameworks like YUI and jQuery, supporting all the different browsers has became a snap for me, so why not? And how exactly does a jscript library make your site cross browser?

I agree that those frameworks are a breath of fresh air in the JS world, but general CSS work isn't changed at all by those frameworks.

Answer 8

I have to ensure my web application works on: IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9, Safari & Chrome. Then there's the mobile version, which is maintained by somebody else. But that has to work pretty much everywhere aslo ...

Answer 9

IE6 & IE7, Firefox 2 & Firefox 3 & Opera. This is based on Google analytics which tells me what browsers are being used. I do not support beta versions of anything.

Answer 10

IE6/7, Firefox and Safari are by far the most important browsers to support. Basically because these are default browsers in the 3 main OS types.

Answer 11

I support whatever I have to support, for a general app I still support IE6 but for something where I know that it's use is small I will try to make the app "work" in it but will not try to make it look nice.

Safari, Opera, Firefox and now Chrome are all easy to support, it is IE and the version of IE that you must make your choice on and as I said, it will probably come down to your (expected) userbase.

Answer 12

I dropped IE6 support for my latest site. The site is geared towards college students, so there's much lower IE usage there, and it's just so painful to develop for. I'd also like to think I'm doing my part to make the web a better place, but that might just be me rationalising.

Generally, I code to FF3, then make the rounds with the newest versions of popular standards-compliant browsers (usually starting with Safari and Opera, though I suppose now Chrome should be in that list too). Then comes IE7 testing (fixing any problems with conditional comments). I'll probably check IE8 before IE7 once there's a release candidate. Last I use services like browsershots to get a quick visual overview of all of the less-common browsers, just to make sure things aren't totally broken.

Answer 13

My current project supports Firefox, Chrome 2.x, Safari 4.x, Konqueror, and IE 7 & 8 (mostly).

Unfortunately, it appears that the webkit that the current (non-beta) Chrome and Safari are on have some bugs that make our cookie handling fail (works on everything else, including the newer beta versions). IE is hit or miss. We have to support it and it works on all our machines here, EXCEPT for mine (blows up in very strange ways on my machine). I've tried to support Opera, but no matter what I do I get a "Could not connect to remote server" error and it doesn't even display the home page!

The only browsers that don't cause me any problems or force me to do extra work are Firefox and Konqueror.

Answer 14

I support IE7/8, Firefox 3, Opera, Safari (sometimes I also support mobile Safari) and Google Chrome (2.x).

I find for the most part, except for a few niggly bits most apps require very little changes amongst these browsers - though there is the issue of javascript performance.

Answer 15

I try to keep the support up for all active Internet projects on the latest and second latest (major) versions of IE, FF, Safari, and Chrome. Even though there has been some recent significant and telling changes in browser usage, those changes haven't been disruptive enough to change this policy.

I use mature javascript libraries from active communities to isolate most of the problem areas so this really isn't all that difficult to do. IE 6 is the hardest one to keep in line but I will be dropping that once the IE 8 stats start beating the IE 6 stats.

Answer 16

IE7, IE8, and Firefox: IE is the most popular browser, and most of the devs use Firefox internally. Besides, if we couldn't debug with Firebug, things would get harder.

IE6, Safari and Chrome are supported in "beta" -- which is fancy speak for "we'll fix critical usability issues when reported, but won't test extensively, and won't waste time on most CSS issues."

We discovered that under 3% of our customers are using IE6, which is low enough that we're just displaying a "please upgrade" notification to those customers. It's saved us worlds of pain -- I feel really lucky that so few of our users are on IE6.

Answer 17

We have clients who are mostly medium business and corporates. For this reason, we still have to support IE6.

• IE6,7,8
• Firefox 3.x
• Safari, recent(ish) version on Mac

A few features behave differently on different browsers, or only work on IE. We have one small part which uses an ActiveX control (There is a good reason for this - it's for something which simply can't be done any other way). Other than that, it should all work.

Most of the problems we have are supporting IE6.

Answer 18

You should probably look at the analytics for your site and generate a list of supported browsers based on your users. If your site hasn't been running for a suitable length of time, then do a search for general browser usage and base your supported browsers on those numbers.

You may want to further refine your supported browsers into a class 1 and class 2, where all features must work in a class 1 browser but some features can slip in a class 2 browser.

Answer 19

Testing on the last two major versions of IE, Safari, FF, Chrome.

If the client requests IE6 they pay extra.