Browsers I rather not support

There has been a little bit of noise about the blog­sphere recently about want­ing to drop browser sup­port for a cer­tain browser this year. So here are the browsers I would like to stop sup­port­ing, why and why I will con­tinue to sup­port them.

Internet Explorer 7

This would of been a great browser if it was released in 2003, instead it was released in 2006. The improve­ments over IE6 were good but not worth wait­ing 5 years for. It still has a num­ber of the IE6 idio­syn­crasies that require work arounds. It is the most pop­u­lar browser is com­mon use today, and likely to remain so for another year, before suc­cumb­ing to IE8. Still you and I will sup­port­ing it for a few years to come.

Google Chrome

A fast, light­weight browser, which I was happy to use while in beta. Since it reached 1.0 release, I have become aware of a few short com­ings. It branched from the web­kit evol­u­tion far too early and has not included recent improve­ments that other web­kit browsers have. For example the prob­lem with border-radius and box-shadow, lack of sup­port for @font-face. In addi­tion the Chrome renders type dif­fer­ently from all other browsers. Still while it has a decent mar­ket share for a new browser and the oppor­tun­ity to improve exists, so it needs to be supported.

Internet Explorer 6

A great browser in 2001, which should of been replaced in 2003 and dis­ap­peared from view by 2006. It has a num­ber of idio­syn­crasies that require work arounds, and you have to spend con­sid­er­able time after get­ting a design to work in IE6 after you had it work­ing in more mod­ern browsers. How­ever, over two years after being replaced it still com­mands around 20% of the IE mar­ket share. This has very little to do with com­puters not being able to sup­port IE7. Less that 5% of all IE6 users are on an OS other than XP.

Unfor­tu­nately IE6’s reign of 5 years cemen­ted it’s pos­i­tion in the cor­por­ate mar­ket and their intranet sys­tems. A large num­ber of cor­por­ate net­works could not upgrade to IE7, because major tools like the fin­ance and human resources sys­tem (in our office) would not work with IE7. These are not quick and dirty loc­ally built tools, but major applic­a­tions built by vendors like Oracle, IBM and the ilk. How­ever, more than 2 years after it’s release, IE7 is now get­ting sup­port from these applic­a­tions and as cor­por­ates upgrade these sys­tem, most are also upgrad­ing their cor­por­ate browser to IE7. Unfor­tu­nately this will take a couple more years, before IE7 or IE8 rule the cor­por­ate sector.

A more dis­turb­ing trend is the net­books and inex­pens­ive laptops that con­nect to the free wifi at work, over 50% of the machines run­ning XP use IE6, com­pared to less than 25% of the XP machines access­ing the reg­u­lar web­site. I do not know if this is because IE6 is the pre­ferred browser for low spec machine run­ning XP or some­thing to do with the large num­ber of Chinese and Korean lan­guage devices.

Still while IE6 is our cor­por­ate browser, I will have to sup­port it, no ques­tions asked. As I will while it remains pop­u­lar in either in the cor­por­ate or low end netbook/laptop sectors.

Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile 6

If you thought sup­port­ing IE6 or the old IE5 was pain­ful, you have never had to sup­port IE for WM5 or WM6. It does not know if is a mobile browser or a full blown browser for the small screen, it loads both screen and mobile pro­file stylesheets, it only sup­ports XHTML-MP which is miss­ing a few key ele­ments from HTML4. JavaS­cript sup­port is inter­est­ing, some scripts work, other do not and some just crash the browser. Unfor­tu­nately it is one of the major mobile browsers and Win­dows Mobile is pop­u­lar in the cor­por­ate sec­tors. Around 10 times more pop­u­lar than the iPhone and Mobile Safari and a lot more than Opera Mobile, my favour­ite small screen browsers.

Browsers I will stop supporting this year

I have already made a decision not to worry about get­ting the new web­site I just launched for work, per­fect in Fire­fox 2 and Safari 2. they accounts for less than 1% of all traffic. So as long as it func­tions cor­rectly that is all I am con­cerned about. Minor defects are accept­able. On the other hand, Fire­fox 2 sup­port will be a con­cern if I every get round to redesign­ing this blog because it accounts for 5% of all traffic. Appar­ently web geeks are twice as likely to stick with Fire­fox 2 than the aver­age Fire­fox user, prob­ably some­thing to do with the trusty web developer tool­bar. Still I will review that later in the year.

I am a little more ruth­less than the Yahoo browser sup­port chart, I have already dropped Win­dows 2000 sup­port. I cur­rently only worry about XP, Vista, OSX 10.4 and 10.5 and Ubuntu as OSes and IE6, IE7, Safari 3, Chrome, Opera 9.5, Fire­fox 2 & 3 as browsers for com­puters. Though I am look­ing at drop­ping Chrome and Fire­fox 2 to func­tional only, while adding IE8 and Opera 10 to sup­por­ted. I also sup­port Mobile Safari, Opera Mobile, Inter­net Explorer for Win­dows Mobile 6 and would sup­port the latest S60 browser if I had access to a test device.

edited 17 Feb­ru­ary 2009 for gram­mat­ical reasons

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under css and html . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.