Useful Resources

Newsletter Archives: Browser compatibility

If your visitors can't see your site with their choice of browser, why would they stay?

Hearing that comment about browser wars always makes me laugh ruefully. Ten years ago the most popular and commonly used browser on the web was Netscape, and people were declaring it the unquestioned victor of the browser wars.

Time passed... things changed. I don't know who will be "on top" ten years from now. However, code I write on web sites will work on any browser, so long as I stick to using web standard coding practices, avoid non-standard technologies, and don't cater to any specific browser to the exclusion of all others.

Creating flexible, browser-friendly web sites is much easier than most people realize. Supporting a wide variety of browsers shows you plan for the long term, and is just good business sense for your company's web site. If you wish to use specialized code, such as JavaScript, insist on cross-platform compatible versions.

It's also easy to use code to identify which browser the visitor is using, which allows thoughtfully-written web pages to look and work correctly in all browsers. Ultimately, your visitors will appreciate a site which is professional and courteous enough to make the effort to display a page which doesn't crash their browser -- even though they'll never notice your careful work until they hit a problem!

One thing to remember is that the web is all about personal choice. Refusing to support someone's choice of browser would be as illogical as choosing to support only one type of credit card. Site navigation written in JavaScript with non-standard extensions (such as those that are Netscape- or MSIE-specific) means standards-compliant browsers, older browsers, newer browsers with changes in feature acceptance, browsers used by the disabled, and many hand-held devices will not be able to access any of the inner pages of your site.

If you're going to selectively support individual browsers or features, say so on your web page! Far better to politely let your visitors know of your design decisions, than to make them feel unwelcome due to their choice of browser. If someone visits your site with a browser you don't support, and cannot access any of your navigation, they might well assume your site has nothing past the front page -- or worse, that your site is constantly broken, and you don't care enough to repair it.

Why are browser compatibility issues important? People tend to write three or four (or more) versions of their "interactivity" functions (i.e. JavaScript, Flash, etc.) -- one variant each for Netscape, MSIE, standards-compliant browsers, and non-standard browsers. Older versions of Netscape and MSIE each have their own idiosyncrasies as well, and if you want to support them too, you can easily wind up with (up to) a dozen different versions necessary for each function you want to write -- which is why no one does that.

This is why browser compatibility is an important technical issue. Using browser-specific functions just encourages people to keep writing increasingly eccentric variations. If we wish to not have to write a myriad of tangled, complicated web page code for a wild variety of incompatible browser types, we must insist on standards-compliant browsers using standards-compliant code.