Building a browser policy: who cares?

Web developers live in a bubble.

In this bubble people know and care what a browser is.

There’s a rather well-known google video demonstrating just how far outside the web developer bubble most people live. The video’s 4 years old now, but I think still very relevant.

So you might be thinking that 4 years later people are more switched on? Maybe that survey was biased? Maybe it was just a bad day and not particularly representative?

But something tells me that video is likely pretty accurate. Most people just want to get online to do stuff with google or facebook or whatever.

They absolutely do not care about browsers. Nor should they.

Nobody cares

Web developers want to design websites optimized for the latest browsers. It makes the job more fulfilling because it gives users a faster, more attractive, and more secure browsing experience. And ultimately it’s all about the users right?

So web developers spend their lives agonising over browser versions. They start playing with all the latest tools and live for the day when all browsers act in exactly the same way.

The problem is, nobody cares.

Excuses, excuses

So why do organisations feel the need to provide browser policies that few care about, bother to read, or even understand?

Well take a look at your average institutional browser policy and you’ll likely see some tables explaining in great detail the levels of quality that you’ll get if you use different versions of different types of browser. IE10 is “gold”, IE8 is “bronze”, Safari 6 is “gold” but Safari 5 is “silver” too, whereas Firefox 3 is… blah blah. Bleurgh. Your eyes are glazing over…

What’s really going on is a need for the institution to have some kind of explanation for why things are the way that they are.

This really isn’t a lot of help to the vast majority of people who don’t know what you’re talking about.

Even to those who do know and care about browser versions these tables still aren’t much use. They get out of date very quickly (nobody ever updates them) and tend to be very vague about the level of service offered by the myriad browser versions. How could they be anything other than vague when you’re considering something as complex as rendering a website of indeterminate design and structure?

So, “The website will be great in IE10 but maybe a bit dodgy in IE7” isn’t a statement that helps anyone very much.

Long live content!

Let’s turn things round and focus on people. We need to accept that people don’t and shouldn’t care about browsers.

Progressive enhancement is a useful concept. It describes a principle that at the most basic level users should be able to access your content no matter what browser they’re using.

People who don’t have the latest browsers may not get the full website experience in terms of visual appeal. But they will get all the functionality and content that they’ve come to the website for.

gov.uk

We took a look at how gov.uk do things, and we noticed their browser help page.

It tells people what a browser is, why they might want to upgrade their browser (security, speed, etc) and then tells them how to do that.

What we really love about this approach is it’s very user-focussed.

It doesn’t make excuses or apologies, or offer complicated explanations that no one really cares about. What it’s saying is very simple: upgrade with our help and you’ll have a great experience. If you can’t upgrade or you just don’t care well don’t worry, things should still work ok.

Summary

We haven’t published our browser policy yet. We’re still considering our options and mulling things over.

There are questions such as: Do we need an internal policy for development and support purposes? Or should we just focus on broader best practices?

What we are certain of is that a good browser policy is more than a set of empty promises, apologies, and explanations summed up in a confusing grid. It’s a distillation of a set of design principles which puts people first and just lets them get on with stuff.

2 responses to “Building a browser policy: who cares?

  1. The world is a place of continuous change, so is the world of tech. We should build stuff that can be continuously evolved to keep up, or at the very least ‘age gracefully’ and failing this to be pro-actively retired. We shouldn’t force people to deal witht some technical detail – browser version – that they really don’t care about.

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