[wp-hackers] Officially supported browsers.

[Anne Gibson]

On Apr 26, 2006, at 11:46 AM, Brian Layman wrote:

> I was just responding to the Anne's specific wording "We support  
> X".  I wanted to emphasize that if X is just one thing, you're  
> turning people away. They are a pet peeve of mine.  To me it means  
> "I didn't have the experience/knowledge/time/respect/intelligence  
> to design my site to work well for you.".

My apologies. Bad wording on my part. As someone mentioned later in  
the thread, I meant X for multiple values of X :) Believe me, as a  
Safari user I can relate to your pet peeve regarding people who say  
"We support X" for single values of X.

> Providing a compliance tag (or listing multiple browsers) says the  
> exact opposite.

This is more what I meant. Example: at the large nameless company  
where I work, we support all the browser/operating system combos   
that our website reports indicate are more than 2% of our traffic for  
3+ months - so right now, that's IE 6+ for Windows, Firefox 1.0+ for  
Windows/Mac, Safari 1.3+ for Mac, and Netscape 8+ for Windows. (*nix  
operating systems, for our specific company, are still running at  
less than 1% usage).  So we list these on the site, and callers who  
aren't using these are encouraged to test their malfunctioning  
functionality in a supported browser to confirm whether it's truly a  
site bug or just a browser with an odd interpretation of the rules.


> Gee, where'd all that come from? I guess I needed to vent!

Venting's good :) Better than exploding. Exploding's bad.

On Apr 26, 2006, at 12:35 PM, David Chait wrote:
> I'd think browser support would be much more of a 'reader facing'  
> issue than an 'admin facing' issue.  That's not to say that wp- 
> admin area isn't important to keep highly functional. ;)
>
> But now, in hindsight, given the discussion of securing the admin  
> area, I  guess I can understand why the question was regarding what  
> browsers properly support the admin area (or vice-versa)... ah well.

Regardless of which of the Wordpress pages a user is looking at, the  
'reader' or 'admin', they're all, at some level, users. And lacking a  
remote-control user cattle prod / shock collar (when I invent this  
gadget I'll make a mint) we can't control what browsers clients use  
-- but we can encourage them toward ones we've already tested.

We have a "base" install of Wordpress - which includes the Admin  
areas, as well as a few base themes that come preinstalled. Surely  
these have been thoroughly tested in some set of browsers, or they  
wouldn't be as stable and effective as they've behaved so far. So,  
uh, which ones are those? Do we post it somewhere I just haven't seen  
it? (I'm not discounting the possibility that I've looked through it.)

thanks for listening :)
anne gibson