What Browser Platform Should be Used For Development?

The question as to what browser platform should be used for developing a web application is a good question to ask. In the past the answer has been: What is the most popular? What will support the features? What will be around in the next 3 years? What are our developers already familiar with?

In the past, if the development was to be kept simple only one browser would be chosen for the target audience. That has been IE in most circumstances.

With today’s emphasis on standards, the answer may not be a specific browser, but more so a given standard. With the current market shares being held by IE at 84.7%, Firefox at 10.05%, and Safari at 3.19% is a total of 97.94%. Assume that most IE users will upgrade to v7.x within the first year of release, and you have a profound percent of the population using a W3C standard compliant browser! So the answer is not what browser you should develop for, but instead what standard.

The second question is, to what browser’s implementation of the standard should you develop for? Why? Because not all browsers will be able to implement 100% of the standard at the same time. Once again, the answer should not be a specific browser as the target, but instead, what features of the standards are supported by the most browsers should be the question.

The goal is to make your application more compliant with what the masses are using. The best way to achieve that is though generalization of what browsers have currently implemented. I am sure that when IE v7.x starts to hit the market you will be able to find more resources comparing the low level components of the standards to all browsers. It should be easier to find out what has been well implemented and what may be best to avoid.

This philosophy may make the most sense with new development. It may be difficult to provide an incremental set of changes to an existing application to comply with the new standard, especially if the support of these new standards are being turned on through the DOCTYPE, which is an all or nothing situation in the use of the new standards.