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Browser Support and Priorities
- on September 24, 2011 at 11:38pm
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Perhaps it should have been expected, but I suppose we should not be a surprised. Whenever someone comes up with a good idea on "Hey let's do this to make this work!", it turns out that about half of the supported web browsers won't run it. The problem browsers are Internet Explorer and Opera, this is including their most recent versions at the time of this writing (in fact Opera updated a few minutes ago and still didn't work with a specific function).
The irony of this will be in a year or two; the problem browsers will finally catch up to the others and by then we would start using other advanced functions that will not be compatible with the troublesome-two and we're back to where we started. This has been a problem throughout the development of this software. I now say enough is enough!
While all major browsers DO run the SZOS and XCMS, the trouble-two talked about above have been holding back development. Instead of using functions that only span out a few lines and are very dynamic, we have to design more static functions and HTML labeling just to get it to work across ALL browsers. Our hope was to scale down the code, make it dynamic and easy to manipulate.
From this point on, if IE and Opera won't run it properly or can be fixed with minimal effort, they will fall off the official supported browsers list. We're no longer holding back advancements to remain compatible with browsers that just don't wanna get along.
Currently the SZOS and the XCMS run nicely under Safari, Chrome and Firefox, that being the latest versions on both Mac OSX 10.5+ (PPC and Intel) and Windows (XP, Vista and Win 7). Using JavaScript to manipulate the DOM, along with CSS3 and old fashioned HTML, these browsers so far have been playing along well.
When it comes to performance, we find that Safari on the latest Intel iMacs running OSX Lion performs the best, with FireFox and then Chrome. On Windows 7, it turns out that Firefox runs the best followed by Chrome, IE9, Safari and Opera last.
So are we really going to drop support for IE and Opera? We believe their current versions aren't salvageable when it comes to developing the SZSO and XCMS, therefor we can only hope that future versions will be able to hold up better. So far the IE10 preview didn't work out, in fact made things worse but we're not going to hate on it until there is a final release. That's not to say that everything won't work in some capacity on these browsers, but we're just not holding back development by waiting on those browsers to mature.
We understand that dropping *official* support for a major browser such as IE could hurt us if not at the least have some people question us, but then again the kind of people we're developing this for will likely have access to several web browsers and not tied to one single browser. Chances are these users will be Firefox or Chrome users and as long as they have the latest versions they'll do fine.
Ironically when this project was first started and IE5.5 was new, IE was the only browser that could run this, now it's one of the browsers that can barely run it. If only MS invested as much into their browser as others invest into theirs.
Email Feedback: Using the form below, feel free to email us with any questions, comments suggestions and even complaints. Any topic any time.
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