Web Development - Support Users, Not Browsers

There has been a long standing debate amongst the web development community about which browsers (and how many versions back) we should support when developing websites for our clients. There are several versions of several browsers all being used on multiple operating systems. All of these browsers are competing for your downloads as a user - this is what we call the Browser Wars.

This article is about browser support for websites, but first a brief history on why we have so many browsers to begin with.

Browser Histories

Anyone with a remotely techie background is probably familiar with all the web browsers available on the web these days and the subsequent Browser Wars that having been plaguing the interwebs like the Crusades for the last decade or so. Ultimately, the browser wars consist of Firefox and Chrome battling it out for web superiority while Internet Explorer sits in the corner and eats glue. Photo credit to Shoze, by the way. Great illustration!

Internet Explorer was the king of web browsers up until the last few years or so. Since Microsoft installs IE on every version of Windows by default, most people have no reason to look elsewhere for a new browser.

It wasn't until Firefox (Mozilla at the time) hit the scene in the early 2000s and started giving IE a run for it's money. This started the browser wars - and a long heated hatred of Internet Explorer amongst web developers. Why such a hatred? Because Microsoft got lazy with it's total market share and never kept their browsers up-to-date with the latest web standards. Every new release of IE was still years behind in technology support of any other browser on the market.

I can't dish on IE too much though, because with the release of IE9, they really brought themselves into the forefront of modern web browsers. I'm not saying IE9 is perfect, but it takes away a lot of our worries as a web developer in terms of what it will support in terms of modern web technology.

Browser Support

So, here we are back at the point of this article - browser support. I've heard from hundreds of developers on the web who say that we should drop support of all browsers more than two version old. If people don't want to update, then screw them!

On the other hand, I've heard from an equally vocal bunch who say we should support every single browser version possible. In the cases where something just won't display correctly, then we should code some sort of "graceful degradation" for those users to still be given a decent user experience.

Ultimately, both of these approaches miss the mark. With the first approach, we abandon a lot of users because of lazy developers. With the second approach, we can spend far too much time and materials supporting something that may be trivial in the end. I say we stop supporting "browsers" all together.

Support Users

Instead of supporting browsers, we need to support users. This, naturally, requires some research into each new client project to determine exactly who will be visiting their website and on which browser.

If it turns out that a large portion of the audience will be using older versions of Internet Explorer, then the website must support those versions. On the other hand, if the website is geared towards a younger, tech-savvy audience, then the website could likely do-away with support of older browsers.

Some people think the browser wars are finally fading away now that Internet Explorer 9 and 10 are out and the older versions are quickly fading away. In reality, there will always be browser wars so long as there are browsers and so long as the web keeps evolving. There will always be new technology (HTML5 anyone?) and new trends in the industry. Some browsers will always be better than others. What we need to focus on as developers is our users.