Judgement Call: Browser Support

I admit it: I hate supporting IE 5. I intentionally left it out of the Holy Grail layout (although some intrepid developers picked up the trail and posted a fix).

It's not just because I'm lazy. Perhaps partly because I'm lazy. But not entirely.

Deciding which browsers to support is always a judgement call. You have to draw the line somewhere. As I see it, there are at least three considerations that can help you determine which browsers make the cut.

Practical Considerations

This is always the first place to turn when drawing up a browser support profile. Check your logs. Are less than 1% of people using IE 5? Are you on a limited schedule or budget? You might be able to do without.

On the other hand, in some situations, every percent counts. Particularly on major e-commerce sites. If you have millions of unique visitors every month, turning away even a fraction of a percent may not be a practical business decision.

The practical choice almost always comes down to money. If you'll make up in additional sales what you lose in additional development time, support more browsers! If not, don't. Consult your accountants for details.

Ethical Considerations

Of course, there are reasons other than cold economic calculus for supporting older browsers. Some view backwards-compatibility as an accessibility issue — and reasonably so. If Grandpa Frisby is stuck using IE 5 on his seven year old PC, and he has neither the resources nor the expertise to upgrade, sites that don't support IE 5 could be inaccessible to him.

Will you be able to sleep soundly knowing that you've denied Grandpa Frisby access to your blog?

On the other hand, consider what would happen if every single website suddenly stopped supporting older browsers. Assume that every website did it the right way, too, offering helpful messages to visitors stuck with obsolete software. It would be a pretty safe bet to say that almost everyone would upgrade ASAP. Even Grandpa Frisby would call over his granddaughter to help him fix his busted internet.

The result? Everyone would be able to pay less for web development. New browser features could be added as the upgrade cycle accelerated. The web would boom. The economy would flourish. Dogs and cats would live together in harmony.

Well, perhaps not. But I don't think it's unfair to say that supporting obsolete web browsers is like enabling a bad habit. The biggest reason some people go six years without upgrading their browser? Because they can.

Aesthetic Considerations

Take a peek at the source code of this site. Done? Good. If you're a web developer, I hope you noticed the clean markup and obsessive indentation. That's my aesthetic preference: not minimalistic, but semantic and well-structured. In cases where supporting IE 5 means muddying my markup with non-semantic cruft, my inner-artist cries. But that's just me.

Others take a different approach. They collect browsers in their support profile like academics collect letters behind their name. Do they really need to mention that thier layout works with iCab 1.05? Not for any practical reason; it's just another badge of honor. And that's OK, too.

It's ultimately an aesthetic difference. Some people prefer the classical elegance of a Mozart string quartet. Others prefer the baroque intricacies of a Bach fugue. Whether you take your HTML simple and clean or ornately supportive is largely a matter of taste.

The Punchline

So, which browsers should you support on your next project? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” Recognizing these (and other) factors will help guide your decision-making process.

As for me, unless a client requires otherwise, I'll stick with elegant markup and browsers that were made within the last five years.