[wp-hackers] Officially supported browsers. was: Security at Wordpress

[Anne Gibson]

I have to agree with this. I've been working web support for years  
and I've never seen an established company with a serious website  
that didn't say, "We support/test X". Successful companies, for the  
most part, support a pretty wide range of browsers - Windows, Mac,  
and *nix - and thanks to the consistency of Mozilla/5.0 browsers,  
usually a problem on one is a problem on all.

Now, the situation at work is a whole lot easier than trying to  
choose a support model for Wordpress -- we have web stats we can use  
to say, "We're getting 8 hits a month from iCab 1.0, I'm pretty sure  
we don't need to support that". And trying to choose a supported  
browser matrix would bring a lot of differing opinions to light I'm  
sure, but just based on the code behavior I'm sure we can rule out,  
say, Netscape 3.0.

Every developer is developing with a set of mental expectations -  
expressed or not - on where his/her code is going to run. Shouldn't  
that be written down somewhere? Even if all it says is "We're  
relatively sure Wordpress will work just fine with IE 5 and any  
Mozilla/5.0 based browser, but if you're running something else you  
may need to modify the source code to meet your needs." we'd be ahead  
of the game.

anne gibson


On Apr 26, 2006, at 3:33 AM, Tom Armitage wrote:

> No, that's exactly the point. There are a huge number of factors to
> consider.
>
> The "officially supported" list tells that world what you test  
> against. If
> you make what you test against public, it not only enforces the
> WP-developers' duty to test against those browser - or, at least,
> _someone_'s duty to do so - it also enforces your decision *not to  
> test the
> rest of them*.
>
> It's a very important thing to have for a web project. Otherwise,  
> the guy
> running an old build of Konqueror can come up, out of the blue, and  
> say "it
> doesn't work!". If you make it clear that you only test on  
> Konqueror verison
> "foo", you can then at least say "sorry, that's an untested  
> version. We have
> tested Konqueror, but only from version "foo" on, and as such can only
> support that".
>
> It's called covering your ass, basically. It makes sense.
>
> On 24/04/06, Craig <nuclearmoose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've never seen an official list of supported browsers. I can't  
>> even see
>> the
>> point of having one as there are simply too many factors to consider.
>>
>> Craig Hartel.
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