DEV Community

Discussion on: How does your web dev team decide on browser support?

Collapse
 
leightondarkins profile image
Leighton Darkins

For applications for consumption inside an enterprise: It's not a decision, it's typically a mandate, delivered reluctantly by whoever the head of the IT Department Happens to be. This can be a blessing and a curse. One time I only had to support the last 12 months of versions of Chrome - I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

For applications facing the outside world: Our focus is always maximum accessibility. That means looking at trustworthy browser usage stats and targeting whatever doesn't fall into the "other" category on the chart - hell, we'd even target "other" if our clients would pay for it.

Typically this manifests as targeting the last years worth of releases for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari (the web's new problem child) and the most prevalent screen-reader.

These days, this combination seems to result in nice, broadly accessible sites.

Just don't get too ambitious and try to implement things like automated screenshot comparison across browsers, for maximum consistency - you'll have a bad time. Things are always minutely different between browsers, accept it and move on 😣.