Mhackintosh blog

I am a Web Consultant, working home in Montréal for different companies, and handling a large file-sharing website. I am -really- experienced, starting web development in 1994, and developing some of the biggest french web site (iBazar that we sold  to eBay to become eBay France). So I am not your casual web developer.

Supported browsers

When we develop large website, we target different browsers on different platforms, actually including iPhone. The iPhone, and iPad, have different behavior due to multitouch-screen that disable us to use drag-and-drop (interpreted as scrolling on these platforms), have different resolution that desktop/laptop computers, and we should handle rotation as a mandatory requirement to enable a great user experience.

iPhone and iPad use Safari, that is a really great browser with a strong engine. Interface, specifications, everything is released by Apple or in public-domain. But it needs specific design, as well as separate tests and CSS/Javascript development. This is a huge amount of work that stack up to the usual work on desktop/laptop development.

So, we try to support Windows PC, from IE6 to IE8 (we begin to drop IE6 tests and won’t support it for long, but IE9 Apha or Beta will come instead!), FireFox 3.5 & 3.6, Safari 3 & 4, and Chrome. We naturally support Mac with Safari 3 & 4, FireFox 3.5 & 3.6, and Chrome too. We don’t support or test on Linux, where FireFox shines with a great compatibility with Mac & PC platforms, and as we all use Linux for development, we occasionnaly use the website under Linux, it’s informal testing, but we know for sue it works.

Consequences for developers

This is a lot of platforms, OS, browsers, and number test-bench and patterns are exponentially growing. We add to that the iPhone (and will add iPad for sure) that needs platforms specific-tests (rotation, specific-touchscreen interface on Javascript, HTTP query analysis, http objects sizes to cope with their caching policy, …). It’s everything but obvious or simple. On some development, tests might require much more efforts, time and finally money spent than conception+development itself!

So adding Opera or another on iPhone or iPad is not a good idea. From the developer point-of-view, it’s another test bench, another risk of incompatibilities, because Opera on iPhone use a different model than any other web browser, a specific engine, relatively unknown, with probably lot of bugs (as others, but on Firefox or Safari they are wll known and easily fixed), so it will add many time to our test, for what?

For less than 1% of our user-base? It is worth the effort? Naturally we won’t support a browser that represent less than 1% of our user-base, especially if there’s alternative, and moreover a NATIVE PRE-INSTALLED browser that is efficient, reliable and gives a real great user experience! It has just no sense, and our CEO won’t allow for that!

Consequences for the user of websites

From the iPod or iPad owner, it will translate to many problems on their daily use of many websites: using a non-supported browser, that act differently than any other may lead to presentation bugs, javascript errors, some forms may even not work, disabling some features of the website. A totally horrible user-experience, something I don’t want to experiment as a user!

In short…

Opera might do a great job, even with a faster web browser, that I plan to test and check, because I am a geek

But from the developer point-of-view, from web companies point-of-view or from the casual user point-of-view, supportig it or using it will only lead to problem, at least until it represent a huge installed base. And it wont represent a huge installed base until problems are fixed!

Stay with Safari on iPhone or iPad, developers like me are trying to give you the best user-experience with it, re-designing website for it, improving interfaces to take into account all the features of your iXXXX, and testing it carefully to avoid any problem.