The Next Big Thing
In 1984, when IBM introduced the 80286 microprocessor chip, the MS-DOS operating system was unable to take advantage of the improved speed and address capacity of the new chip. A popular urban legend has Bill Gates asking, “Why would anyone need more than 640KB?” Fast forward a few years and Gates was requiring his engineers to develop on hardware that was two years old – ancient by software developer standards, because the majority of Windows users were still running on 386’s.
Late last century, when I worked for another software development company, we tested our product in no less than 12 different ‘flavors’ of operating systems including UNIX, Windows, local area network systems, and Web browsers. Legacy support cripples product development and the thrill of releasing radical new functionality is laced with paralyzing fear of destabilizing the software.
A similar scenario is brewing today with Web browsers. Knovel is in a much better position because we develop Web-based software. But there, the picnic ends. Our software engineers generally use the latest browser versions, and our engineers typically prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer. (Not a judgment, just my own informal survey and personal preferences.) Our users, on the other hand, use browsers dating back to Netscape Communicator, and a majority of our users are still on IE6. With the advent of IE 8, we are now mandated to test and support a minimum of 6 different browser versions: IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, FF3, FF3.5. And not surprisingly, our defect list tracks more IE6 items than any other browser version.
The engineers say, “Why can’t they just upgrade? and “These older browsers are far less functional.”
Tom Dahm, writing for NetMechanic, sums it up nicely: “The major difference between two versions of the same browser is their support for newer portions of the HTML language. A new browser is generally better at displaying Web pages than an old one.”
As keeper of the Knovel Product, I grapple constantly with the question of browser version support. We’re aiming high in the product functionality realm and, increasingly, the older browsers are simply not up to the task.
So, what’s the answer? I am painfully aware that most of our users are constrained by strict IT policies that govern what browser(s) are used in their organizations, and how and when upgrades are managed. I am not optimistic that this will change, nor am I under the illusion that Knovel has the clout to force a corporate browser upgrade. What I do suggest is that Knovel will soon add messaging to our product advising users that Knovel is optimized for use with certain browsers [for starters, IE7 and above, and FF 3 and above], and hope to influence customers who use older browsers to consider the benefits of upgrading.
But what do you think? Either from a developer or a user standpoint, what browser related frustrations have you encountered?
October 25th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
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