Should You Support Older Browsers On Your Blog?

Credit: Amazon

We have had so many browser updates in the past few years that it’s hard to catch up with all the changes and updates. But the fact remains that no everyone is using FireFox, Internet Explore or Opera. Not only that, not all your visitors are taking advantage of the latest versions of those browsers. That means your blog may not show up the right way for some of your visitors. Microsoft IE is notorious for breaking websites and not displaying them correctly. I don’t claim Microsoft does that on purpose, but Internet Explorer is one of the most frustrating browsers to deal with as a developer.

The older IE’s are even worse. A website that looks completely fine using the oldest Firefox or Opera browsers may still not show up correctly in IE 6. Now here is the challenge: should you make sure your bloggers shows up the right way on all those older browsers or should you just tell your readers to upgrade? I admit that sometimes it’s tough to make your blog show up right on those older bloggers. As a blogger, you probably have access to a limited set of resources. Your programmer can spend hours making your blog backward compatible with all those old browsers or you can just focus on a limited set of them and ask other to upgrade.

I learned my lesson the hard way. As many of you know, I blog on a few other tech blogs as well. Recently, we adopted a WordPress theme and customized it without changing the underlying code. Little did we know that the programmer had put a special code in place to block IE 6 users. Let’s just say that didn’t go down too well with some of our readers. Here is the image that the site would display if someone tried to browse through it using IE 6 or older versions:

I admit the above message was a bit condescending and uncalled for. But the fact that the code would block people from going through our pages was more damaging. I don’t know about you but I want to be inclusive on my blogs. It’s tough to promise full browser compatibility to your readers, but if you show them that you do care, they will appreciate it. Something my angry visitors didn’t do:

“Sorry, but you’re using ie 6″?

No option to proceed anyway after the warning?

Screw you and your condescending attitude.

Not everyone can make his/her blogs compatible with all the browsers that are out there. Nevertheless, there are tools that you can use to make the process easier. For instance, you can use Browser Shots to run your website on a whole lot of older platforms to see if there are any issues with your site’s code.

Most issues can be resolved by optimizing your CSS code and validating your site’s code against W3C guidelines. But before you spend a large portion of your time and resources to address compatibility issues, make sure you know how many people are affected and how serious these issues are. A large corporation may not have too much trouble throwing money at these kinds of problems. But most bloggers don’t have the time or resources to do that. So it’s better to know your priorities before tackling every single issue with your blog.