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Dave
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Jun 10, 2002, 11:02 PM
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What browsers should we support?
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Hello Everyone,
We've been talking about what browsers to support for our new software products and I wanted to get some feedback on what everyone thinks. What we're thinking, is it's time to drop support for Netscape 4. Netscape 6 was released over a year and a half ago, Netscape 7 is likely a couple weeks away and all the other browsers have progressed so far it's getting really hard to be compatible with everybody and still write nice code or take advantage of new features in HTML, Javascript or CSS.
Moving forward, instead of designing interfaces to work with various browsers, we'd like to write interfaces based on internet standards (XHTML, CSS, etc) and then double check them for compatability with the major browsers.
Here's the browsers we're thinking about supporting:
Netscape 6.0 and up (Mac and PC)
Mozilla 1.0 and up (Mac and PC)
Internet Explorer 5.0 and up (PC)
Internet Explorer 5.0 (Mac OS) and up (It's actually different from Windows IE)
This would allow us to write standards compliant XHTML 1.0 (XHTML is the latest version of HTML and has been a recommended standard by the World Wide Web Consortium since January 26, 2000) that would be compatible with all current and future browsers.
So here's what I want to know. Do you still develop for Netscape 4? Do you test your pages with it? If you do, do you test the latest versions 4.7+ or the original 4.0 (They're actually very different). Do you have clients running Netscape 4.0?
What browsers do you think we should support, what your thoughts on the matter. Let me know.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
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philm
User
Jun 13, 2002, 2:06 AM
Post #2 of 13
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Re: [Dave] What browsers should we support?
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WOW so many views and no-one's taken the plunge ;)
I think the list you suggested is fine and gives more than enough options and flexibility for users.
Personally, we don't actually develop *for*, but we always try to test the pages on NN4.7, just to make sure it doesn't look too hideous. We definately don't have many, if any, users running NN4.0.
Also, many browsers on the list have been around for a while, I imagine 99% of people will be running one of these?
.:Sticky New Media:.
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dlo_itools
Staff
Jun 13, 2002, 9:17 AM
Post #3 of 13
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Another browser to consider adding to the "supported" list is Opera. It is small, fast, standards compliant, and has been out for a few years.
I think the user-base is larger in Europe than in North America, but don't quote me on that.
/dlo
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ColinW-O
User
Jun 13, 2002, 10:17 AM
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I personally use Netscape 4.76. Believe it or not, I prefer it more than IE. I test my site(s) on both browsers and make sure they load fine on both.
Colin
Wrestling-Online.com
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Dave
Staff
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Jun 13, 2002, 12:05 PM
Post #5 of 13
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Wow, that's interesting! Have you tried Netscape 6 or Mozilla 1.0 (very new)? If so do you still prefer Netscape 4.76 over them? What operating system are you running?
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
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ColinW-O
User
Jun 13, 2002, 12:11 PM
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I tried Netscape 6, bit it loads fairly slow on this crap I call my PC. :) My laptop is the only thing that can handle some serious workload but didn't try Netscape 6 on that either.
I haven't tried Mozilla 1.0 yet.
I always check that my site loads good on both Netscape and IE. I'm sure I'm not the only one who uses Netscape, so you have to make sure both browsers load the site the same. If something is different, I change it so it looks the same.
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Dave
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Jun 13, 2002, 12:13 PM
Post #7 of 13
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Well, I know Opera is big on being standards compliant. The "hope" would be that ANY "standards compliant" browser would be supported in future because we'd be writing to support the standards and not specific browsers. In many ways IE 6, Mozilla 1 and the upcoming Netscape 7 will be mostly standards compliant. And I think (hope) that all future browsers will have to be as well, because the precedent has been set.
I know one of the things that really frustrated me in the past with Opera was that very few (if any) of their javascript bitwise operators actually worked. I was playing around doing MD5 password hashing on the client side so passwords wouldn't have to be sent over the network plaintext (assuming no HTTPS connection) but apparently the support just wasn't there. Maybe it is in the newer releases.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
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Dave
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Jul 1, 2002, 10:32 AM
Post #9 of 13
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Re: [ironmike] What browsers should we support?
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That's an interesting read, thanks! : )
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
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simonlilly
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Jul 11, 2002, 3:28 AM
Post #10 of 13
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Re: [Dave] What browsers should we support?
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Dave,
What sort of timescale are you looking at to produce XHTML compliant output? I potentially have a large project that would involve 7 similar sites that would use AM as the main CMS, but it needs to be in an XHTML compliant output.
Any kind of forecast would be good - i.e. early 2003 etc..
Cheers,
Simon
---
Simon Lilly
Web Bloke
www.meridiantv.com
---
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Dave
Staff
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Jul 11, 2002, 8:19 AM
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Re: [simonlilly] What browsers should we support?
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Simon, the next major (X.0) releases will all be XHTML compliant. Likely XHTML transitional as there is still a few things that are still a little hard to do in the current browsers with XHTML strict.
As far as your project though, because all the output is generated using templates you could likely just make your templates XHTML compliant and be good to go with the current system.
The one exception is when the program adds <br> tags when the user hits enter in the "summary" or "content" fields, if these aren't changed already, we could do a minor release to have them output as XHTML compliant <br /> tags.
If you do decide to put a XHTML template set together, make it as compliant as you can and then run the published pages through a validator and let us know about any issues and we'll work with you to address them for a minor (1.X) release.
Note: For those who are curious, XHTML is just the name for the latest version of HTML. It's essentially exactly the same as HTML but requires that you have good form in your code. For example, you need to close all your tags, etc. There's also a few little interesting things such as when you have a single standalone tag that doesn't have a closing tag (br, img, hr, etc) you need to put a " /" at the end to let the browser (or XHTML parser) know that it's not an enclosing tag. For the most part, XHTML looks and works just like HTML. So... Don't be scared! We're not switching to some new markup language that nobody knows about. It's just HTML with all the t's crossed and i's dotted. : )
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
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Teknoenie
Novice
Jul 15, 2002, 12:19 PM
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Re: [Dave] What browsers should we support?
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Konqueror of course for those of us who don't use Windows/Mac
:)
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Dave
Staff
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Jul 19, 2002, 10:05 AM
Post #13 of 13
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Re: [Teknoenie] What browsers should we support?
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I've actually used Konqueror before and was impressed by it's speed and ability to render pages correctly. Do you think people are going to stick with it now that Mozilla 1.0 (and soon Netscape 7.0) are out? And do you think the Konqueror developers are going to keep with their own rendering engine or maybe switch to gecko in future?
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
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