Page 1 of 1

What browsers to develop for?

Posted: Sun Oct 10, 2010 10:50 pm
by TonsOfFun
I assume it is smart to make sure the code works in IE8, Firefox, and Safari.
But what about some of the other ones with less market share, like Chrome or Opera?

Should I still be concerned about IE6?


What browser do you initially test in?

Re: What browsers to develop for?

Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 7:35 pm
by mecha_godzilla
IE7 (and IE6 to an extent) are still important - there are a lot of XP users still out there. IE5.5 and 6 are probably 10 years old now but I still support them if I can - the main issue I run into with these browsers is PNG support (which you can work-around fairly easily) but any advanced CSS just isn't going to work of course. To give you some figures, I just checked the access logs for one of my sites and approximately 30%-40% of my visitors are Windows XP/IE6 users (and no, I don't run the "IE6 hints and tips" site!)

I'd suggest that supporting Chrome is a must because it will inevitably end up on all sorts of handheld/netbook devices, while Opera's market share is pretty small so I don't tend to bother - this works in my favour because, historically, people that have been using Opera for a while have gotten used to pages not loading in it properly :)

As always, you need to think about your audience and what kind of devices they're going to be using to access your site. If you haven't done so already, I'd suggest installing some kind of web stats application like TraceWatch or BBClone as these can give you a detailed breakdown of your visitor's browser type and version, etc.

HTH,

Mecha Godzilla

Re: What browsers to develop for?

Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 7:49 pm
by TonsOfFun
Awesome.

Thanks.

Re: What browsers to develop for?

Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 8:25 pm
by Eran
This thread might also be relevant to you - viewtopic.php?f=6&t=121892