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Whats in a Number: The Cost of Pursuing Advanced Web Development

March 12th, 2012 - Posted by Ben Thomson, Director of Operations

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I remember the days when I started out as a web developer over 10 years ago, the battle for the best web browser was fought between different companies from those today – namely Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape’s Navigator, both of which were on lowly versions of 4.0. Lazy programmers preferred IE as it allowed for incomplete HTML to be displayed correctly which in turn helped make deployment of websites easier to accomplish. Personally, I found that testing code in Netscape’s offering always meant you could be sure it would work in both of the popular browsers. As a community, developers still struggled making code compatible with just two browsers... the late nights and the hours involved getting this right I will never get back!

Fast forward to today and although the players have changed, the game has not. We have of course seen the demise of Netscape, with the Mozilla foundation taking the source code and making it open (with the biggest name releasing this as Firefox). New entries have also appeared, and we see our customers using everything from Apple’s Safari to Google’s Chrome. Considering how quickly standards have been introduced, you would think that developing web sites would have become easier since all browsers appear to be compliant on the face of it...but nothing could be further from the truth. The gap between browsers is getting bigger and the job faced by developers is getting harder.
 
At Red Tie, we consider ourselves experts at producing cloud based Web to Print software, so browser technology is an important part of what we can and cannot offer. We have constantly pushed the boundaries of what is possible through a browser and with the advent of HTML5 we are realising features that would not have been possible even 2 years ago, never mind 10! By increasing the power of our software we are facing tough decisions on when to stop supporting older browsers. One of the key deciding factors in dropping support for a particular browser is also one of the most obvious, worldwide usage. There are plenty of companies that offer this information so let’s take a look at the Jan 2012 statistics from one of them:
 
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 – 1.56%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 – 3.63%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 – 20.82%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0 – 11.44%
Google Chrome 16.0 – 25.79%
Firefox 5.0 – 0.57%
Safari 5.0 – 1.36%
Various others – remaining %
Source: StatCounter http://gs.statcounter.com/
You might see these numbers and think it's no big deal, IE6 is less than 2% market share. On anything other than the scale of the internet that might be true but with estimates putting the number of people in the world with internet access at over 2 billion even 2% adds up to millions of users.
 
Now I don’t want to come across as being anti Microsoft but IE6 to IE8 are appalling browsers, they didn’t meet the standards of the time when they were released and if you are still using them you are really missing out on what the web is today. Microsoft then took a very strange decision and made IE9 available exclusively for its latest operating systems, leaving a huge number of Windows XP users with no upgrade path for a Microsoft browser.  
 
Thankfully Google has not placed any such restriction on the Chrome browser and it turns out that this browser, which meets more of today’s standards than any other, has moved into first place overall. It is also a browser that follows one of the new trends of being on a constant upgrade path so everyone has the latest version all the time. This might sound familiar to RedTie customers who benefit from the same service; all of our customers have the latest version of our Web to Print solution and receive upgrades automatically several times a year. 
 
So where does that leave the supporting of older browsers by our software? We have historically supported all browsers back to version 6.0 of Microsoft’s IE, in fact as developers we have to take some of the blame for IE6 (and 7 & 8) being around so long, we spend so much time making workarounds for the old browsers that we have probably extended the life of them by much longer than they would ever have survived on their own. 
 
We are now on the brink of removing support for such dated software however (10 years old is an age in the world of the internet) and apparently we are not the only ones. Microsoft have finally decided to start the countdown of laying IE6 to rest,  http://www.ie6countdown.com/. 
 
Are we able to control the choice of browsers? No, but working with our customers to ensure that their clients have the best experience while using our software is a top priority of ours. Hopefully as time goes on, we will see greater compliance across the board (Internet Explorer 10 is looking very promising already and we live in hope that Microsoft will actually produce a good browser for once) which can only lead to richer and more advanced features for any software. 
 
I personally welcome the chance to focus on new and exciting development rather than having to commit so much of our resources to trying to make our web to print software work for the few that haven’t upgraded. To that end I feel that “browser education” should become part of all of our messages.